by Anna Kavan
For a time Anna was completely overcome. She seemed submerged. Naunggyi had drowned her, deep, deep, in unfathomable seas of strangeness. It seemed as though she would never come up again. She was done for, drowned. And then something changed in her mind, she altered. It was not that she came to any decision; her vagueness, her bewilderment, her general behaviour remained much the same. But she looked at things from a different standpoint. Whereas before she had been submissive, stunned, indifferent, she now felt herself in violent opposition to everything. She still submitted, she made no effort, but behind her submission there was a new bitterness of resentment. She remained passive and dazed. And yet there was in her a fury of resentment all the time. Furiously her resentment piled up, against her daily life, against Matthew, against the house, against everything.
At times she could hardly bear it. It shook her like a madness, the violence of opposition that was in her. But it seemed that it could find no outlet. Not yet. It was all bottled up inside her, a seething frenzy of unspeakable indignation. But at the same time she was aware of a lightening somewhere. It was too slight, too remote to be called thought. But far off, at the very bottom of her consciousness, there was a stirring, a sensation that the worst was over. The night was black still, utterly, dismally profound; but it had passed the darkest, morning was on the way.
Inward stirrings notwithstanding, her existence continued irksome and monotonous to distraction. She still felt she would die, in the horrible, maddening blankness of it all. Certainly, the country was attractive, with a thrill of magic. But she could never really get near to it, she was shut out. So that even the beauty of the place only added to her sense of lonely futility.
The bungalow depressed her more and more.
‘The place is like a stable,’ she said to Matthew, with a tone of sudden exasperation in her voice. He looked at her in surprise. It was her first complaint.
Matthew’s attitude was rather peculiar. At Richmond, he had been full of apologies for the deficiencies of River House. But here, in Naunggyi, he accepted without demur every discomfort, every sordid detail, and expected Anna to do likewise. This was his world, he was in his true element, the dominant, complacent male. He had his work and his sport, he had Anna. He was a ruler of the people. What more could he want? He fairly pranced with complacency these days.
His satisfaction made him good-humoured. Since Anna was not satisfied with the house it must be embellished. They set out early one day to drive to the bazaar in Naunggyi. The early-morning landscape was wonderful, pale gold and blue and green, the marsh glimmered anew. Natives were going along the road to the village, women in their bright skirts, some of beautiful thick silk with the flowery, intricate patterns, blue, purple, scarlet, green, with baskets on their coiled hair: men with bare bluish tattooed thighs, treading softly in the thick dust: jungle people in single file, fantastic, gnome-like, trotting silently under great mushroom hats.
The bazaar was brilliant, there in the centre of the village, among the bamboo houses on their wooden piles. All the houses were perched up above the ground, as if they were on stilts. It gave the village a quaintly fantastical look, like a village in fairyland. Silks, cottons, slippers, hats, jewellery lay spread out on the low stands under the palm-leaf awnings: further on was the crowded food-market. From bullock-carts bales and bundles were arriving, people came up with every conceivable thing, baskets, coco-nuts, pottery, umbrellas, sweets, cosmetics, and loads of vegetables and fruit and flowers.
Matthew and Anna went from stall to stall, with a man to carry their parcels. Anna bought silk for curtains, and some bowls and ornaments of black and gold lacquer, very Chinese-looking and dragonish, and white mats embroidered in coloured wools for the floor. Matthew went with her, inclined to scoff at her purchases. Rather domineering he was, and bargaining rudely with the sellers. Anna felt ashamed for him. He seemed churlish and uncouth beside the laughing, graceful people.
They went back to the car, and Anna looked round at the lovely press of colour, the brilliant skirts, the huge hats or the jaunty little head-scarves of the men, the golden piles of fruit, the heaped, vivid flowers, the goats and dogs, the pale, elegant bullocks – and she longed to make herself part of it, to take part in that life. But it was impossible for her to take part in it. It was as if she watched it all through a glass window. She could not come near.
If only she could get through the glass. She looked out on the rippling colours of the crowd. The sun was hot on her hands. Matthew was wiping his forehead with a blue handkerchief: he lifted his hat, and she saw his head for a second, black in the golden sunshine. The queer fish. She shuddered in distant repugnance.
And these brown-skinned creatures, what were they? She watched a youth who was passing, playing on a Chinese pipe. The little wail of sound came broken, weaving in and out of the market noises, very thin and clear. The bare, brown torso of the youth was beautiful, she saw the curious shadowy blueness of the tattooing on his slender thighs.
She looked at him, his black hair, his golden body – so close to her, so similar a being, yet so incredibly remote. How great a gulf must always divide her from him! And as she looked at him he turned his head; a sort of recognition flashed in his eyes, an acknowledgment of her. He was aware of her. And he was looking at her over his long pipe, watching with that open, smiling look. He smiled at her. He seemed to look at her with friendliness and good will, and frankly, freely, keeping his own dignity and freedom. He did not impinge on her. He kept his dignity and his restraint, his liberty, intact. And he left hers intact. She felt a quick glow of appreication for him, for his delicacy, his dignity. If only she could communicate with him. She felt him as a human being – one who would not humiliate her, or make demands upon her, or treat her unworthily. He blew a little personal tune for her, his dark eyes smiling. And he passed on. Why, oh why, was he on the other side of the glass?
‘We must get back,’ said Matthew. ‘I ought to be at the office by now.’
She looked at him. She looked coldly, dispassionately at him. She looked for the winsome quality, the suggestion of something pleasant about him which she had seen in the beginning. And now she could not see it, she knew that she would never see it again. Only she saw his obtuseness, his stupidity, his crudeness. He was uninteresting. He was nothing. She had got inside the parcel at last, and there was nothing there. The ultimate secret of her surprise packet revealed itself as a blank. He was nothing at all. She did not specially dislike him. But she resented having to live with him. Living with him was almost too much of an insult. Her cold, indifferent eyes watched him, and repudiated him. He would never be anything at all to her. Even though she yielded him her body.
She got into the front of the car, which was loaded up behind with the things they had bought. She heard the shred of a tune drifting over the noisy crowd, seeking her out.
‘Are you pleased with your shopping?’ Matthew asked.
‘Yes,’ she answered. She looked at him with grey, condemnatory eyes, wherein lurked a sardonic contempt.
‘All that silk stuff will go rotten as soon as the rains start,’ he said, a covert sneer in his voice. It hurt him all at once that the house was not good enough for her. It was good enough for him. He felt that she was slighting him.
They rattled back through the growing heat of the morning. It was very hot by the time they got back to the shabby, gloomy house. The servants came out to meet them. Matthew went indoors with Anna, while the parcels were being fetched from the car.
Anna looked at Matthew impartially. When they were inside, out of sight of the servants, he took her in his sinewy embrace. She saw the smooth, tough skin upon his cheek. And his hair, brittle and dry and lustreless, with a strange dead look, repulsive. How could she endure his embraces, how could she suffer him, and live? In the hot, tropical stillness she felt a chill. But the worst was over. She knew that there would be an end. Some time, she would shake off the nightmare and the marsh, and be for ever undismayed
.
CHAPTER 15
TIME went on. The brief, beautiful spell of winter weather was ending. Every day it grew a little hotter, the nights began to lose their freshness.
‘The hot weather will soon be here,’ Matthew said.
Anna stood outside, in the sparse and speckly shade of the tamarind trees which seemed to be always losing their leaves, and watched the big lizards basking on the branches and on the trunks of the trees. Some of the lizards shone blue like turquoise, they really seemed carved out of turquoise matrix, they glowed, they shone. And the other wrinkled, yellowish lizards were also like ancient carvings in precious gold. Minute after minute the dry, inscrutable, ancient-looking creatures hung motionless on the rough bark, as if waiting for something. Anna watched them, with her grey-blue eyes.
‘Shall we be here for a long time?’ she said to Matthew. ‘For always?’ She seemed to speak with a kind of impertinence, lost upon him.
‘Till I get transferred to another station.’
‘And when is that likely to happen?’
‘Perhaps not for years,’ he said indifferently. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I see.’ She had a slight smile on her face, secretive, slightly contemptuous, which he did not notice.
He now felt almost sure of her, almost safe. Only occasionally he was afraid of losing her. For the most part he thought he had safely caged her. He thought he had won. He did not realize how her spirit was set away from him. And she, when she saw his complacency, his obtuseness, she felt the old heavy suffocation, weary, hopeless despair, like a slow suffocation.
They lived in the same house. And she submitted herself to him. Outwardly she seemed apathetic, hopeless. But inwardly she trembled, she grew sick with the horror of his proximity. She felt she must die. Yet she did not really despair. She had in her some calm foreknowledge that kept her alive. She would escape, sooner or later.
But Matthew’s unreality affected her strangely. It seemed to make her unreal also. The strangeness of the place, of the bungalow, of the people at the club made her feel like an actor in some meaningless play. She was unreal. She was not herself. The real world she had left behind her; she was wandering now in a strangely lit, false world of unreality, imitation houses and painted landscape, and mouthing, unnatural people.
Quite unreal, quite out of herself, she went to the club, or sat in the lonely bungalow, mechanically, like a clockwork figure. She felt that Matthew had turned her into an automaton, destroying her individuality. It was his influence making her unreal.
She felt as though she had lost herself. Her personality was absent. She was like a mechanical thing moving about, with no real existence.
She appeared to be settling down. She now had two rooms more or less habitable, the drawing-room and her own room upstairs. These rooms were quite pleasant, with curtains of stiff, shot Mandalay silk, and bright rugs on the floor. And she had written for books to be sent her, she had books and papers to read.
She did the things that were required of her, the things everyone else did. But whatever she was doing remained unreal to her, nothing had any significance. She went to the club; the talk which she heard and in which she joined was like a dialogue heard in a theatre, she seemed to listen to it from outside. With a vague surprise she heard her own voice speaking. But it was not she herself who spoke. She was simply not there. She had no contact with anything. There was no meaning in the world in which she now moved, it was made up of shapes and noises, without reality or consequence.
During the greater part of the time she was alone in the house. Then everything became blank. The loneliness completely extinguished her, it washed over even her fictitious self. She was nothing.
Matthew’s work obliged him to be away a good deal: five days, a week, sometimes ten days at a time. He took his own personal servant and the second house-boy who could cook a little, and went off into the jungle with his guns and papers and paraphernalia. Then Anna was quite alone. She became a vague, aimless portion of a vague, meaningless world. It was all a sort of empty madness, a madness of vacancy. Everything faded into blank inanity, she was a blankness, everything was blankness, there was nothing but blankness, and it was horrible, horrible. It almost killed her, it was so horrible.
The nights were worse than the days. The days were just bearable, so many stretches of interminable emptiness, that seemed really endless. But they did end, and then came the horror of the night.
Slowly the horror would accumulate, soaking into Anna as she lay on her hard, uncomfortable bed. The frogs were noisy, and their croaking rose from the marsh, a strange disharmony of sound, half-bark, half-cough, filling the silence of the house. She was quite alone. The servants slept away in their row of primitive go-downs at the back. And she knew, if she called, they would never hear her, or would pretend not to hear.
Anna would lie on her bed under the ghostly net. There was no light but the faint, discomforting pallor that came from outside. She could not even lock herself in. And she could feel the demonish exultation of the marsh gathering on the tepid air.
She thought of the horrors of the jungle, the stalking, silent creatures, tigers and panthers with their fœtid breath, and the great snakes moving unseen over the darkened ground. And she thought of the people apparently so gay and innocent, with a friendly look. But at the same time, how extraordinary they were, how incomprehensible. Who could tell what unknown devilry lurked behind their smiling insouciance?
She lay and thought in the darkness. And all the time her nerves were trembling, strained tight with horror. She heard the irregular beating of her heart, now loud and fast as though to choke her with painful speed, now slow, slow with a deathly reluctance, till she could fancy herself really dying. But always it would start again, the laborious beating, beating her back to renewed consciousness of fear.
She knew the ultimate fear of darkness, in the night. Her nerves seemed stretched to breaking, in a long pain.
She thought the morning would never come. She slept, and wakened suddenly with a fresh start of fear. She sat up and listened. From far away, out of the unknown night, the slow clanging of a gong came sullenly. Then it stopped, died away, and immediately the noise of the frogs filled up the empty darkness.
It was torture to her, the loneliness of the night. It terrified her and destroyed her. The nightmare was worse than anguish to her. It destroyed something in her mind.
In a trance of apprehension she went through the empty days. She was all the time waiting for the night, her mind was screwed up in a knot of suspense. As the days of loneliness passed, her misery increased. She wondered vaguely how she could endure the awful horror that had overtaken her. Then Matthew came back.
And immediately the horror retreated. Its edge was dulled. She was no longer quite alone in the ghastly black void of the night. She came back to herself a little. Her blood began to flow again in normality. But still there was the tension underneath. She was lonely, she was endlessly lonely. And she was afraid. The horror was gradually inflicting a permanent injury, a sort of unhealing bruise was coming on her mind.
Anna had her books and her curtains, her little odds and ends of personal possessions in the house. But she was not really settling down, although she appeared resigned. Even Matthew realized this. It rather irritated him to see her wandering aimlessly about, or sitting under the punkah, with the curious vague, lost look on her face. She seemed to have no sense of permanency. She never looked upon the bungalow as her home.
‘What is the matter with you?’ he asked her, hostile. ‘Why can’t you be like the rest of us and make the best of things?’
She smiled at the futility of the question, and would not answer. She knew the hopelessness of trying to talk to him.
It made him indignant that she still remained somehow apart. It shattered his complacency to think that he had not finally conquered her even yet. He craved so much to possess her utterly, not in the possession of love, but as one might triumph over an e
nemy. It came to this, that he craved to conquer her. And he had so nearly succeeded. He possessed her body, he had imprisoned her in the house with him. He had cut her off from her own world. It seemed that he must have vanquished her completely. She seemed so submissive. And yet, in some way, she still eluded him. There were moments when he could not believe in his victory over her. He had not got her altogether, even now.
This made him very angry. A frenzy of determination came to him to possess her utterly. The sense of frustration was maddening to him. He must, must conquer her.
He began to hate her for eluding him. He hated her because he knew that she despised him. He hated the way she had of looking coldly at him when he spoke to her, and then turning away her face in a gesture of cold, indifferent contempt. It made him feel he could kill her.
And Anna, when she looked at his angry face, when she saw his eyes blank and opaque like two circles of blue glass, and the strange cunning expression, almost imbecile, yet so crafty, about his mouth, then a great disgust overcame her, a shuddering repulsion. And she knew she would have to escape: or die. It really seemed at such moments as if she would die, or as if he would kill her.
And then it would be all over, suddenly. The tension would relax, the atmosphere would suddenly change. Back would come the old Matthew, the man she had known at Blue Hills, the neat, well-mannered, innocuous person, quite uninteresting and unimportant, but well-disposed towards her, and even genuinely affectionate – her husband. He would smile at her, and say quite nice things from his mouthful of sharp little teeth. There was something agreeable about him, his odd, inconsistent humility, his sincerity. It all seemed genuine enough. But, at the same time, there was the rabid hostility underneath, a sort of repressed madness, rather frightening. Sometimes Anna was a little afraid of him: sometimes a goblin perversity drove her on and on to provoke him: but for the most part she disregarded him. He did not matter.
