Sleep Has His House

by Anna Kavan

  All these people, the lady, the chauffeur, the gardener, the maid, have the same face which they wear as if it were a mask, indifferent, decorous, nondescript, and quietly, negatively repressive. If the chauffeur and his employer were to change clothes no one would notice the difference.

  Meanwhile, a door opens into the usual drawingroom, arranged with half-taste, too many knick-knacks, too many vases of flowers. The casement windows have chintz curtains and the same material has been used for covering the sofa and chairs. The room only differs from other suburban drawingrooms because a good deal of the bric-à-brac comes from the East.

  The visitor sits down with her feet close together. She has been in the room before. As she takes off her gloves and smooths the creases out of them, she glances about the room, stamping it with the tepid pass of her recognition.

  After a minute the door opens and the mistress of the house—for the sake of economy she may as well be called A—comes in. She is nearing forty, her still young face is attractive in spite of the discontent harassing it. During a rather long-drawn-out pause she stands in the doorway at the far end of the room. There is plenty of time to observe her. The details of her appearance become clearly defined; narrow neurotic face under bright curled hair, uneasy hands, plain light dress very simple compared with the visitor’s outfit. This woman’s restless, artistic personality is considerably over-emphasized by contrast with the mediocre, phlegmatic mask-face worn by all the others. However, she seems a little too dramatic to be quite convincing. There is a suggestion of planned exhibitionism about her pose in the doorway which is so prolonged as to produce an effect of tension. As she at last shuts the door quietly and comes forward, in dream fashion the room gradually heightens and elongates: at the same time an invisible sponge passes over it, eliminating detail; windows are blotted out one after another till only a single tall window remains, admitting a flat neutral light, between stiff fluted curtains: so that she advances into a long, cold, lofty, uncoloured room which is empty except for the unaltered chintz chair where the visitor sits and one or two other indistinct objects which symbolize furniture.

  With each step A takes, a modification, corresponding to what’s happening in the room, progresses in her own appearance. All her tragic potentialities are brought out and accentuated. She grows taller and thinner, her face chalk-white and haggard, her hair curls into a stiff sacrificial crown. Even her dress changes colour, turning red-black, so that she eventually stands like a dark pillar in front of the blank window. She has her back to the room and to the visitor who has remained sitting in the flowery armchair, feet side by side, smoothing the creases out of her folded gloves.

  How you must miss it all, the visitor says.

  Synchronizing with her perfectly commonplace voice, the light starts to grow dim, diminishing steadily until the room becomes quite dark except for the luminous window against the lower part of which, in the exact centre, A’s sombre silhouette remains standing throughout, absolutely motionless.

  How you must miss it all, the visitor says.

  The romance of the East, a precisely similar voice says, answering, in precisely the same ladylike, banal, superficial tone. From different parts of the room other identical voices eject similar comments: The colour, The mystery, The gay social life, and so on. As each voice speaks, a pasty finger of light rambles towards it, just barely indicating repetitive replicas of the original caller and establishing the existence of a chorus distributed round the darkroom. Every time the light touches a new speaker she is shown sitting with consciously crossed ankles, consciously ladylike, her face tilted to vacancy, smiling the conventional vapid smile of the afternoon visitor.

  While this goes on, the view outside the window, materializing from nothing, presents a sequence of Far-Eastern scenes dissolving into one another, tremendously fast, immensely disorganized. It is never possible to grasp these visions completely (they are partly hidden by the black shape standing with her back to the room) because of their speed and the confused way in which they evolve themselves at all angles and on different size scales.

  For instance: a minuscule landscape with palms and temples, instantly smothered by the overflowing of a gigantic yellow river in spate; slither of water yeastily regurgitating refuse and half-seen domestic objects; rafts on which families are living, fishing, washing, cooking, sleeping, engaging in intimate occupations of all descriptions, suddenly soar upwards like magic carpets: a tangle of upside-down horses’ legs racing; intersecting arcs of swung polo-sticks swooping: ambiguous smiling bland oriental faces: gathering of Very Important People (white, most of them, but a sprinkling of highly decorated and jewelled nabobs in magnificent costumes for picturesque local colour); personages with orders; uniforms; elaborately dressed women. Then, getting more tangled and chaotic, a crazy avalanche of flowers, mosquito nets, champagne bottles, electric fans: hands carrying trays, golf bags, rackets, wraps; guns, whips; white hands, brown hands, yellow hands; hands lighting cigarettes, cigars; holding weapons, holding glasses, holding reins, rackets, bats, sticks, clubs; holding other hands: mouths with lipstick, with moustaches, with thick lips, with thin lips; Eastern mouths, Western mouths; mouths shouting orders, kissing, singing, drinking, whispering: liners, trains, cars, tongas, traps; baggage, horses, mules, bullocks, sampans, rickshaws; children, dogs, coolies, ayahs: ships sailing, troops marching, storms breaking, doors opening, moons rising, suns setting, trees blowing; dust-storms, thunderstorms; meetings, intrigues, assignations, partings.

  Immediately after this the somewhat more stabilized formality of a black tree-trunk, of which A’s body forms a part, with perfectly naked bilateral boughs, immediately sprouting several huge white trumpet-shaped flowers.

  There is an infinitesimal break in continuity as the dream angle changes a little. The comments of the chorus veer, but scarcely, and continue

  you must find it a great change living here

  very different indeed

  perhaps a trifle dull after all your travels

  although we have our own interests too

  there’s always plenty going on in a quiet way

  the bridge parties

  the tap dancing at the health class

  the sale of work

  the Women’s Institute meetings

  the garden fête at the vicarage

  dinner at Dr. Moore’s (such a charming man).

  The accompanying pictures outside the window by contrast with the previous sequence are very slow and definitive; their materialization is painstakingly realistic and they follow the spoken phrases meticulously, with strict, but not exaggerated, attention to rigorous suburban respectability, dullness.

  And then it’s so easy to run up to town for a theatre or a film.

  Quick in the vision the closed car sliding along, a man with a white silk scarf at the wheel, a woman beside him wearing an evening wrap of some kind; their dummy figures sitting stiffly erect, their white faces calcified in boredom. Branching out of the car fading, the black arterial road with lateral streets swings back to the black tree, the black woman’s body clamped to the tree. This time the flower-spurting is reversed, the petal wreckage dripping down flaccid, a slimy tatter of dissolution, semiliquid decay.

  The light goes back sharply to normal, returning to the dream the suburban drawing-room, the chintzes, the knick-knacks, the vases of flowers. A has just sat down on the sofa. Under polite composure her limp attitude protests against hard reality. The visitor, sitting exactly as she has sat from the start, is saying something indistinguishable to her as the maid comes in at the door pushing a trolley with bright crested silver tea-service, plates of thin bread-and-butter, absurdly small cucumber sandwiches, macaroons.

  A little girl with fair hair—she is unmistakably the child of her mother and so could be called B—peeps in through the open door, unnoticed by the grown-ups; then tiptoes away.

  OUR house always seemed especially quiet, as if people spoke there only in lowered voices. My p
arents seldom had time for talking to me. No one talked to me much: hut the rain often used to whisper.It rained a lot and the rain kept whispering to me. In the long afternoons when the rain filled each window and shadows met together in every corner, I sometimes thought of the sun and the Japanese houseboy. It was lonely in those rooms dark with my mother’s sadness and with the rain on the windows. The rain shut off the house by itself in a lonely spell.

  In time I found out what it was that the rain whispered. I learnt from the rain how to work the magic and then I stopped feeling lonely. I learnt to know the house in the night way of mice and spiders. I learnt to read the geography of the house bones.Invisible and unheard I scampered down secret tunnels beneath the floor boards and walked a tightrope webbing among the beams.

  After that I never wished for children to play with, or for the Japanese houseboy to tell me fantastic stories. Hidden by curtains, sheltered in cupboards, ambushed in foxholes between the tables and chairs, I transmuted flat daylight into my night-time magic and privately made for myself a world out of spells and whispers.

  THE PRE-REALIST fantasia opens up in an inchoate sort of Marie Laurençin dream of delicate tints. No form to speak of. Just a pearly billowing and subsiding of fondant chromatics; baby blue, candy pink, lemon-icing yellow, all sweetly harmonious and insipid like a débutante’s bon-bon box tied up in cellophane and big satin bows. After a sufficiency of this things begin to take shape, but as we are taking a long view of the time-stream and creation hasn’t occurred yet, there’s naturally a lot of fluidity. A tinkling twinkling musical-box tune, with accompanying Tyrolean or Swiss dancers, fancy peasants, rose-wreathed cupids, angels with nightgowns and cheeks like pomegranates, is liable to translate any minute into a Brahms symphony and the austere discipline of the ancien corps de ballet.

  In the same way the mountain which presently arches itself up like a cat’s back is perhaps Mount Olympus, or perhaps Mount Sinai, or perhaps it is a cat’s back and not a mountain at all. Assuming that it’s a mountain, as a closer view seems to confirm, one gets an impression of pellucidity more appropriate to a mirage. There are crystalline snow slopes, diaphanous groves of trees, hyaline rocks, and, in the immediate foreground, a small lake, clear as glass, the translucent waters of which have surely never been contaminated by so much as a minnow.

  Perhaps it is an extreme northern latitude that gives such rarefied transparency to the scene, lighted, as it appears to be, by the limpid coruscations of the aurora borealis. And this is a theory which gains a certain amount of support from the arrival of a party of hikers, of a truly Scandinavian robust comeliness, who proceed to picnic by the water’s edge. Every one of these picnickers, old as well as young (for there are several elderly people among them), is remarkable for his or her splendid physique, and for a skin tanned to a glorious golden brown. As might be expected of such magnificently fit specimens, they are full of abounding gusto and energy. Every now and then members of the group, unable to contain their joie-de-vivre, go off to run races or engage in contests of strength, calling aloud to each other by oddly familiar names. A good deal of indiscriminate necking, of a specially exuberant, whole-hearted and unself-conscious variety, also goes on; and this gives rise to sudden jealousies, apt to culminate in violence or in malicious pranks and practical jokes. It is noticeable that these childishly evanescent loves and quarrels spring up and are forgotten with equal ease; and perhaps this has something to do with the wine with which all the haversacks seem to be well supplied.

  The irresponsible holiday atmosphere has a good innings before certainly pronouncedly killjoy clouds, gathering censoriously over the lake, begin to deluge the picnickers with torrential rain. It’s no ordinary mountain storm that comes on, but an absolute cloud burst, a cataclysmic jet of watery disapproval, a purge which attacks the gay party with dank tenacity, never letting up until it has succeeded in washing them out of the picture entirely.

  And now that the clouds clear away the whole aspect of the mountain has changed. Vanished the lake, the roseate dream-light, the ethereal snows. Instead, a prosaic materialism illuminates a dado of arid crags behind a laboratory where a scientist is working, an old fellow with a grubby grey beard reminiscent of those superannuated physicians who dodder out their last days at obscure Continental spas. He is wearing a voluminous white overall tied with strings at the back, and this gives him a grotesque likeness to a stout elderly bonne. The overall, beneath which his broad-toed black boots poke out like obstinate tortoises, is none too clean, being spotted, not only with spilled food and gravy, but by traces of the various experiments with which he is grumpily occupied. Back and forth he lumbers between his microscope and his reports, frequently pausing to consult a huge reference book, so massive that it might almost be made of stone, but without ever seeming to find the formula that he wants. A specially baffling point teases him, he paws at the great tome, shakily turning the pages with his vein-knotted hands.

  He doesn’t see the face watching him through the window, the cretinous grin under the shapeless straw hat full of holes. The village idiot peeps in round the post of the open door, grows bold seeing the old man so absorbed, and cautiously tiptoes into the room. The idiot boy advances in shambling stealth a little nearer the table where something is spluttering over a burner; cunningly keeps his eye on the reader; jerks himself nearer still. He is attracted by the bubbling mess in the tube; then fascinated by it; his hand stretches slyly towards it, draws back, fumbles to it again; he twitches in violent excitement, grimacing at it; clutches it.

  The whole bag of tricks flashes up at his touch in an explosion of glittering dust. There’s a split second’s glimpse of the vast sad blackness of infinity before the perfectly bare void is spattered by this glittering exsurgence, this bursting fountain of molecules, instantly crystallizing to sequins of differing size. And now at once begins the fiery development of comets, suns, planets, nebulae; constellations are clotted together; worlds rush forth on their immense navigations; the monstrous efflorescence of the universe burgeons in the flick of an eyelash. Creation is under way. The solar system is off. Larger and more brilliant blaze the globes, the stars roar past like stratoliners to destinations not checked in quadrillions. The billiard-ball earth swings up and flattens colossally underfoot. The thunderous revving of the cosmic machines settles to the steady beat of eternity.

  Right in the middle of all this, in a quiet place, the little girl B sits reading a book. She is sitting on short fresh green grass, leaning against a tree, where it is quiet and cool. Everything here is springlike and very much simplified; just the grass and the innocent green tree and the child. Before long several other children appear and begin to play with red and green bean bags. They stand in two rows and each child throws the bag over his shoulder to be caught and passed on by the child behind. Their conduct is orderly, ritualistic, almost obsessional. They are completely concentrated on their serious attention to the rules of the game, their occasional subdued exclamations barely disturb the hush. Under the tree, B puts down her book and looks on. It’s clear that she would like to join in, but she feels shy and needs some encouragement. The others pay no attention to her, they are quite absorbed in their game. At last B gets up and goes towards them. Play stops for a moment. A boy with a polite blank public-school face steps out and gravely invites her into the game.

  Perhaps B is nervous, perhaps she doesn’t understand the rules, perhaps she just means to introduce an innovation. Anyway, when it comes to her turn, she throws the red bean bag forward instead of back. The game breaks up at once, as if by telepathic agreement. The faces of the other children grow astonished and hostile. The polite boy in particular wears an outraged expression as he marshalls his companions away.

  Left alone, B stands bewildered, looking in the direction where the players have vanished. After a moment, quickly and hopefully, her eyes are drawn to a man (it’s her father, as a matter of fact) who walks along fast, dressed in dark town clothes and carrying a d
ispatch case and an umbrella. Her face turns upwards in expectation. But he is in too much of a hurry to notice her, he has important things on his mind, he passes on and scurries into an enormous office building which at this moment snaps up like an opera hat out of the ground to the right of the tree. As soon as he’s in, the ornate double doors close behind him; but still, through the wrought-iron scrolls, he can be seen diminishing down room after room full of clerks, typists, desks, telephones, green-shaded lamps; door after transparent door shutting behind his back, till he is at last inaccessibly entombed as if in the heart of a gigantic formicary.

  B, who has taken a few steps towards the building as if she meant to follow him, drifts back to the tree, on the other side of which a plain stone wall with a door in the centre has now erected itself. From some distance off, A approaches aloofly, her hand already outstretched to the door. On this narrow door, with her left hand, with a blue-flashing ring, she raps in a deliberate fashion. While she is waiting for the door to open she turns her eyes slowly upon the child, at whom she looks directly and pensively. Then her eyes move, sliding without eagerness to the door which, opening, displays a dark space where it is just possible to distinguish the sculptured pallor of urns in the deep shadow. A goes inside. With two final, distinct clicks, the door is shut and locked. The little girl watches with the acceptance of perfectly uncomprehending fatalism, then sits down in her original place at the foot of the tree. As she picks up her book and starts reading, the wall and the office building dissolve unobtrusively, restoring the dream picture as it was to begin with. The only difference being that its vernal simplicity now holds a definite suggestion of loneliness, isolation.