I Am Lazarus (Peter Owen Modern Classic)

by Kavan, Anna

  Then in the train it was gone and she attended to him again: but now with anger reviving in her he was only the murder man, and having no clear idea of the inside of a plane, she saw only an anonymous robot, padded, helmeted, hung about with accoutrements and surrounded by switches and dials, sowing catastrophe from a lighted box in the sky.

  ‘How do you ever sleep?’ she asked the man who was sitting by her in the blue clothes, here, in the underground. ‘Don't you feel frightened to go to sleep?’

  ‘It's our people or theirs. You know that.’

  ‘I know that because there's a murder committed next door all the rest of us in the street don't have to start killing our neighbours.’ ‘It's war,’ he said. ‘I simply do my job. Do you suppose I enjoy bombing civilians? Is it my fault?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If you know what you're doing and acquiesce in it that makes you guilty.’

  ‘No. You're not fair.’

  She looked at him and saw his eyes screwed up painfully as they would be when he looked into the sun. The wrinkles around his eyes looked strange on the young face, almost like painted lines.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘The morepork was calling for you all right. This is the worst badness that could have happened to you, that you should turn into a murderer.’

  The train was stopped in a station and a woman, hearing, turned in the doorway as she was getting out and said, ‘How dare you speak like that to one of our glorious boys?’ Then the doors slid shut in front of her outraged face and Ken made a sound like a laugh that was not really amused and she, sitting beside him, laughed too and said, ‘Spreading dismay and despondency among His Majesty's forces. I could be put in jail.’

  And, because of the laughter, she recognized the young face for which, somewhere, she had had some affection, regretting again dimly the eyes strained and screwed up as if they were hurting, and said, ‘Don't take any notice of me; I suppose I'm a bit crazy’, falling easily into the pattern she ran her life by.

  That was the easy pattern, to let people think she was a little mad. And it was true that she was a way they never would be able to understand, with the woolgathering, and now the picture and that bad luck bird that had come with Ken in the light in front of them all. She heard him say, ‘It's all right’, and then there was nothing more said and it was time to get out of the train.

  The platform was crowded and most of the bunks occupied. Here and there people slept already and a man near the tea urns was wandering up and down selling buns from a tray slung on a strap round his neck. There were more shelterers than there usually were.

  ‘Warning's just gone,’ one of them said, close to her, as they passed, and Ken said quickly, ‘What?’

  ‘The warning,’ she told him, stopping because he had stood still suddenly. ‘The glorious boys in the different uniform.’

  Of course it's lunacy: we've all of us gone insane, she said to herself, thinking of the planes streaming out, crossing the incoming enemy stream up there in the freezing sky. Did they signal like passing ships or just ignore one another? The demented human race destroying itself with no god or external sanity intervening. Well, let them get on with it. Let it be over soon. She was very tired of the war-world and only wanted everything to be over. It seemed not to matter any more what happened. There had been far too much happen already. Queer how tired apprehending a war made you. The war had always been there in the different countries, but it had taken London to bring her the apprehension of war. This can't go on, she thought sometimes, waking suddenly in the night or moving about a room: this can not go on. But it went on and on and she went on somehow, only feeling always more and more tired. She thought a little about how tired she was.

  Walking along the platform, keeping pace with Ken who walked slowly now, the woolgathering took possession of her and all the way up in the lift she was dreaming the double stream of destruction, feeling the composite entity of the bomber-streams, gigantic cruising serpents of metal horror circling and smashing the world.

  Guns were firing and searchlights were setting their geometrical snares when they came out of the station. The searchlights had not caught anything. They closed and opened and closed and drew blank again.

  ‘Hadn't we better wait a bit?’ Ken said.

  ‘It's only a minute from here and there doesn't seem to be any shrapnel,’ she answered, not quite out of the woolgathering.

  She started along the pavement in black shadow. There would be moonligh t on that side of the street when they turned the corner. The moon was just past the full. It was under this moon that, walking home by herself, she had seen the morepork perched on the roof and calling its ominous cry. The budgerigars in their cage twittered with fright. No, that was somewhere else. Where was that? Her eyes refusing the lighted sky she was not sure what part of her life she was in; and then she was back from wherever it was to the war and the war-locked town.

  The gunfire died down briefly and a plane began making its familiar maddening, hysterical, unescapable sound. She did not notice at first that Ken had stopped walking beside her. Then the noise of the plane got louder and she remembered about him and he was not there and that startled her and the night seemed unreal. Looking back then, she could see a darker bulk against the dark wall of a house, and she got the torch out of her bag and flashed it and saw his face lifted and turned to the sky. The light fell full on his face and she looked once and switched off the torch quickly and went to him and said, ‘Ken’. But the guns started again and he did not look at her but moved away fast, looking up, back towards the tube station, the way they had just come.

  She called, ‘Ken, Ken’. And then, not knowing where the words came from or thinking them even, ‘Oh, no, no. Oh, please no. Oh, Ken’.

  There was no answer, it was hard to hear anything in the barrage, but she heard footsteps running.

  In the sky, the laborious searchlights exultantly caught and clamped a desperate plunging speck in their trap. But she did not see it because quite suddenly her eyes were too full of tears.

  FACE OF MY PEOPLE

  BEFORE they took over the big house and turned it into a psychiatric hospital the room must have been somebody's boudoir. It was upstairs, quite a small room, with a painted ceiling of cupids and flowers and doves, the walls divided by plaster mouldings to simulate pillars and wreaths, and the panels between the mouldings sky blue. It was a frivolous little room. The name Dr. Pope looked like a mistake on the door and so did the furniture which was not at all frivolous but ugly and utilitarian, the big office desk, the rather ominous high, hard thing that was neither a bed nor a couch.

  Dr. Pope did not look at all frivolous either. He was about forty, tall, straight, muscular, with a large, impersonal, hairless, tidy face, rather alarmingly alert and determined looking. He did not look in the least like a holy father, or, for that matter, like any sort of a father. If one thought of him in terms of the family he was more like an efficient and intolerant elder brother who would have no patience with the weaknesses of younger siblings.

  Dr. Pope came into his room after lunch, walking fast as he always did, and shut the door after him. He did not look at the painted ceiling or out of the open window through which came sunshine and the pleasant rustle of trees. Although the day was warm he wore a thick dark double-breasted suit and did not seem hot in it. He sat down at once at the desk.

  There was a pile of coloured folders in front of him. He took the top folder from the pile and opened it and began reading the typed case notes inside. He read carefully, with the easy concentration of an untroubled singlemindedness. Occasionally, if any point required consideration, he looked up from the page and stared reflectively at the blue wall over the desk where he had fastened with drawing pins a number of tables and charts. These pauses for reflection never lasted more than a few seconds; he made his decisions quickly and they were final. He went on steadily reading, holding his fountain pen and sometimes making a note on the typescript in firm, small, legible han
dwriting.

  Presently there was a knock and he called out, ‘Come in’.

  ‘Will you sign this pass, please, for Sergeant Hunter?’ a nurse said, coming up to the desk.

  She put a yellow slip on the desk and the doctor said, ‘Oh, yes’, and signed it impatiently and she picked it up and put a little sheaf of hand-written pages in its place and he, starting to read through these new papers with the impatience gone from his manner, said, ‘Ah, the ward reports’, in a different voice that sounded interested and eager.

  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 co-operated 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 re-read 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 round 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 round and smiled directly up at the good nurse he had trained. He was very pleased with her and with himself. In spite of trouble some 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 round 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 loves.

  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 breaths 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.