by Kavan, Anna
My heart gave a great bound, and something went through me like lightning, like steel, that might have been either despair or triumph. It was all over. I had known all along. Now I’d achieved my object, the thing I most dreaded and most desired. I was alone again, unloving, unloved, as I always had been and would always be, world without end. At this moment of spontaneous revelation, the truth emerged, unmistakably, everywhere and in everything: shouted by the vast indifferent glacial silence of night and stars, petrified in the forever-suspended drop, proclaimed by the disposition of flowers, no longer scattered at random. For a timeless instant there was nothing but this hugely significant truth.
Then, slowly, I was aware of myself again, some tiresome detail of external reality would persist in molesting me, bringing me back to concrete things, to the light shining straight into my eyes. Mechanically, I moved a few steps out of the glare and, by making this automatic movement, fractured the spell. I couldn’t return to where I had been. Slowly turning my head, I surveyed the room, which seemed both familiar and strange, like a room remembered from years ago. What had happened to me in this room? What had I been doing here?
Memory flooded back, and with it came a terrible black wave of desolation and loss; sweeping out of the dark building below, it towered over my head and exploded in soundless thunder, obliterating all thought, leaving only the urgent need to follow, to find – a need as elemental and all-excluding as the need for breath, displacing all other needs and thoughts.
I have no clear recollection of what came next, only of flying headlong from the house and of running, running, as if for dear life, stumbling and slipping in the icy streets, my footsteps shattering the stern nocturnal hush, seeing nothing, but all the time staring wildly about me, though whom I so frantically sought I didn’t know. I have the impression that the streets were empty and that I met no one; but if they’d been crowded I probably wouldn’t have noticed, so oblivious was I of everything but the one consuming need for a person without a name, without whom I couldn’t live.
Somehow I must have got myself on to a bus, though I remember nothing about it except the conductor repeating, ‘This is as far as we go’, and looking at me very strangely. He must have said it several times already, for he shouted the words, doubtless thinking I was deaf, and when even then I didn’t immediately understand him he glared at me fiercely, as if he suspected me of playing some trick on him, shaking my shoulder to get rid of me or wake me up. Horrified by the grasp of his large hand, which half recalled to me something that fearfully threatened, I jumped up and off the bus. But, once on the pavement, I had enough presence of mind to remember to walk slowly till I was out of his sight, only when I got around the corner starting to race away, with no thought for where I was going.
When breathlessness and a sharp, stabbing pain with each breath made me slow down, I didn’t recognize my surroundings. The buildings seemed to have drawn back haughtily from the street, which trailed off into obscurity in the distance. Beside me a high brick wall rose perpendicular and unbroken by doors or windows, indeterminate black masses looming beyond; but it didn’t dawn on me that I’d reached a suburb till I made out the bare skeleton of a tree. The odd thing was that, though I didn’t know where I was, I instinctively turned in at an entrance gate and unhesitatingly passed through into the dark drive without pausing to wonder why, at this hour of the night, the gate should have been standing wide open.
The house was all in darkness, except for two lighted windows flanking the pillared porch, tall pointed win dows I must have noticed without being aware of it on Christmas Day, for I remembered them now. It was, of course, Carla’s home to which I’d been brought, as if by a will quite separate from my own. As I looked at it, the curtain of one of these windows was pulled aside, and with a kind of inevitability Carla herself appeared and stood looking out with an expectant air.
I was startled, for she seemed to be looking straight at me, and I hurriedly stepped aside, into a bank at the edge of the drive, up which I scrambled. Safely out of sight at the top, I could still see her peering out, as though she knew I was there somewhere in the darkness but with an odd uncertainty most unlike her usual steady gaze. For a second I couldn’t focus the memory it recalled; and then my mother’s image appeared so vividly that I could almost hear my own unkind boy’s laughter mocking her superstition, and caught an instantaneous glimpse of similar resentful motives for my recent bad conduct. This backward flash over, I found myself thinking, even in my muddled state, that since Carla presumably was the person I’d been chasing with such urgency, I should have attracted her notice instead of avoiding it. But I had no real comprehension of my own acts or of anything else. And now her face was no longer clear. I couldn’t even be sure that I’d really seen her at the window. This uncertainty, I realized, was entirely down to mental confusion. Something seemed to be wrong with my eyes, which I was continually rubbing as if wiping away tears, and it came back to me that for some time as I hurried along I’d been trying to clear my vision in this way.
Looking up now, I was astonished to see a great flock of small white birds descending on me, filling the air, gliding and hovering all about me, so close their cold wing-tips brushed my cheeks and forehead. I waved my arms to scare them away. But they came at me still more thickly, hiding the window and diving and darting right into my face as if to peck out my eyes and blind me altogether. When I saw that they weren’t birds at all but great snowflakes I watched them, fascinated, as I’d always been in my childhood, by their ceaseless falling and turning, a palely glistening cur tain that drifted down without end or beginning, lightly shaken from time to time by some wandering air current as it changed direction and sent small eddies scurrying to and fro.
Suddenly, startlingly, two level beams came swinging around from the street, drove purposefully through the glimmering stuff and pointed straight at the house, lighting it up, though I myself was passed over and left to merge indistinguishably with the anonymous dark. In that setting, where all was vague, fluctuating and tenuous, these twin beams seemed, to my equally vague state of mind, to show an almost concrete definition and purpose, driving right to the heart of the situation, which was my rejection, while brightly illuminating what was forbidden to me.
I saw that they came from the headlights of a big car that had silently stopped just below me. And, instantly, I was transported to quite another time and place, gazing down with a child’s awed astonishment at the great black beetle filling the width of the lane; then, aware of the weight of my rifle, watching the miraculous-seeming arrival at the foot of the school boundary wall.
These backward excursions confused my already un certain identity even more. How could I be sure who I really was? To make the confusion worse, another picture now came before me, perhaps the memory of a dream, perhaps originating in some actual scene from the past, but transposed into a different dimension, where the face of apparent reality seemed about to drop, like a mask, to reveal the unimaginable strangeness behind. I was walking along the water’s edge on an interminable beach of pale sand, following someone’s footprints, which the small colourless waves were forever obliterating, though not so thoroughly that I ever lost sight of them ahead between the smooth, untrodden ellipses left by the water. Except for myself, the beach was absolutely forsaken, the sea on one side, and on the other walled in by high unscalable dunes. It seemed to have no end, and there was no escape from it, under the pale, tight-fitting lid of sky.
Though the powerful beams of the headlights recalled me instantly from this vision, it interfered for a moment with my view of the car and the snowstorm and Carla, standing in the porch, so asserting its uncomprehended significance. But before I could even ask myself what it meant, the sequence of events it had interrupted was once more restored. History seemed to be repeating itself when Spector emerged from the car into the white whirling dance of the snowflakes, which the light, spreading up, thickened into a falling fabric over his head, a faintly shimmeri
ng canopy.
Reverting to those two occasions my memory had retained so distinctly, I now felt the same shock, his presence seemed to assert itself with the same stark vividness, in the same abruptly portentous fashion. I only saw his face for a second before he turned to the girl, turning his back on me as if to confirm my rejection, so that I saw him as I had on Christmas Day and knew I’d recognized him even then.
So acutely was I conscious of him that when he took Carla’s arm to lead her back indoors I felt his dominant possessiveness and his insistent will, as though it were my arm he was holding. My eyes confused by the shifting pattern of snowflakes, and my mind by the weirdly shifting flux of personalities and unstable time, I couldn’t locate myself anywhere in my life. I couldn’t understand the strange blend of nostalgia and resentment that filled me until, for the second time, my mother’s image appeared, and I wanted to rush to Carla and pull her back, out of the tranquillity of her daydreaming face, because of my dream of the past, which ended so catastrophically.
My own dream was already ended, and that I was to have no part in hers was made clear by the way she and her companion were briefly outlined against the bright oblong of the open door, so closely joined by their linked arms that they might have been one. Despairing loneliness overwhelmed me as the door closed behind this composite figure of my two loves, now mysteriously become one and the same, excluding me with such decisive finality that I could only submit, as to a sentence passed on me long ago.
The lights went out. I felt at the same time a shift in my situation and that I’d been delivered into the power of my past. For a moment that seemed eternal I stood there, balanced precariously, high up in the darkness, bewildered by the unstable pallor forever falling out of a black sky, coldly, ghostlily, touching me and dissolving and touching again.
Somehow my surroundings were changing. I was afraid. It was dangerous for me to stay here, yet I dared not stir, pits of nothingness opening on every side. The world was dissolving in darkness and danger. Nothing was solid or safe any more in this high, unstable place, where a wan paleness wavered and fell like light through dense wind-shaken foliage. The very foundations of reality had begun to dissolve. I didn’t know where I was, either in space or in my existence. Lost in the deepest possible sense, I’d lost even the reality of my life in the world. My real self was dissolving, falling away from me. To my horror I felt myself some small, despised, abject thing – some kind of vermin – without teeth or claws or any means of protection, the most defenceless creature alive, hated and hunted by all the rest. My destruction was their common duty, an easy task, accomplished by one weak blow.
Utterly vulnerable, at the mercy of the whole world, I was waiting alone in this high, rocking insecurity – from which I already seemed to have watched myself deserted by all I had once trusted – for the vengeance racing towards me out of the past. In full cry, the past was hunting me down, and I knew myself now eternally doomed and hated, a criminal, outcast, isolated by guilt from all other living things, rejected by life itself. There could be no expiation and no escape, except by the door into senseless blackness through which I had once sent –
As a nightmare breaks before the falling dreamer can hit the ground, before the past could swoop down on me, completing the memory, the situation shifted again. I was once more myself, though confused and diminished far beyond rational thought by the dreadful and dream-like strangeness of these latest experiences, which my sense of reality could barely survive.
My memory of what followed has always remained unclear. I have only a vague impression of reeling away from that place and afterwards of walking endlessly through the falling snow, which obscured the atmosphere and smothered the town in unnatural silence, its huge flakes swarming around the lights, which at long intervals punctuated the empty street, stretching ahead of me to infinity.
I remember how from time to time the pale, undulating veil parted and buildings, hugely distorted, loomed up like skyscrapers and how the white carpet, always thickening under foot, hid the edges of the pavement but would not bear my weight, so that I stumbled often and almost fell. I had the idea that the paving stones grew all the time larger, so that if I could have seen them I wouldn’t have been able to stride from one to the next. I know I was dead tired and moved very slowly with the great effort of every step. And it seemed I would never arrive anywhere but must go on for ever like this, through the interminable, purgatorial, snowy streets, till at last I dropped from exhaustion. It would be very pleasant, I thought, to lie down on the untrodden white and let the snow cover me and hide my guilt out of sight; and I remember thinking how I’d pull this coverlet over my head, as I used to pull up the bedclothes when I was a child and wanted to hide from some disappointment or shame. But for some reason it wasn’t allowed now, and I had to keep moving, alone as surely I’d never been before, in the silent cold night, irremediably forsaken, all warmth, all affection, everything I had loved and trusted withdrawn from me absolutely and for all time.
What comes back to me when I think about it is a childish loneliness and forlornness, growing gradually into that feeling of being lost and internally cold that used to bewilder me during the hard winter of my mother’s indifference long ago, when I piled logs on the fires but could light no corresponding warmth in her heart or my own. It was only the cold inside me of which I was conscious; I don’t recollect feeling cold in my body, though I’d been so long in the snow without the overcoat that I had, of course, forgotten when I rushed out of the flat. I suppose I was feverish and indebted to fever for this resurgence of those old feelings of deprivation and frustrated love that I substituted for others less bearable, which should have been my concern. At all events, I was ill after this and ran a high temperature for several days.
How I eventually got home I don’t know; nor do I know how or why the caretaker’s wife came to appoint herself my nurse, for she neither asked nor volunteered anything and indeed rarely spoke to me at all. Until now I’d only been vaguely aware of this strange, silent woman, who never spoke to anyone as she went in or out of the building and always wore the same blank, discouraging face; but now I was glad she was looking after me, for she wouldn’t gossip, I knew, about anything I might let slip while the fever was at its height.
Throughout this period my guilt pursued me relentlessly, evidence of it appearing frequently in my surroundings, convincing me that I was directly responsible for my parents’ deaths. If I had really planned the double murder in cold blood I could hardly have experienced greater torments of distress and self-loathing than those I suffered in the hallucinatory fever world, where images from the past mingled confusingly in my head with more recent memories.
Wherever I looked, I saw reminders of my crime. The harmless ceiling geography of cracks and stains changed before my eyes into the disastrous mushroom shape of explosion, spouting horrid details, fragments of limbs and clothing. If my gaze fixed itself on the bedspread, the oriental design would soon become a sort of exotic jungle, out of which sneering, sub-human faces would peer, reminiscent of the sinister chessmen at school.
My only respite from guilt was when Carla seemed to be in the room, very lovely, her hair darkly framing her calm pale face; but this was almost as bad, for her serene shining gaze was always cold and indifferent. She never smiled, never spoke to me nor touched me. And though she sometimes leaned over the bed as though to kiss me, I came to dread this more than anything, because of the way her face always became distorted as it approached mine, vanishing at last with a look of disgust or a mocking smile it had never worn in real life.
Spector, too, made his appearance, a tall, shadowy, menacing figure, faceless and almost formless, towering above me in mysterious silent denunciation. And sometimes the two of them would seem to blend into each other as they had done in the porch, so that I couldn’t tell whether one or both kept watch on me from the shadows gathered thickly under the sloping ceilings.
These visitations left so strong a
n impression that afterwards it was hard for me to believe neither of the people concerned had really been there; which accounted, I think, for my failure – when my temperature fell and the delusions left me – to appreciate the completeness of the break between us. Without consciously thinking about it, I must have assumed that sooner or later one or other of them would reappear and reclaim me, otherwise I couldn’t have been so calm – I couldn’t have given way to the profound lethargy that for some time made me indifferent to everything. Long after I became convalescent and was, physically, on the road to recovery, my mental state remained unchanged. I couldn’t bear the prospect of taking up my life in the world again. At the same time, it was impossible for me not to realize that there was something distinctly abnormal, not to be accounted for by my short illness, about an apathy so deep and prolonged. The mere thought of resuming my former activities was abhorrent to me. And, fascinated, almost, by this heavy torpor, I began to explore it and to write down what I found, thus occupying many long, solitary hours of my convalescence.
It was obvious that, to get at the truth, I would have to delve back into my early memories, as I’ve tried to do here. At first I was troubled by Spector’s over-prominence in the picture, emerging from the start as a huge, isolated, out-of-scale figure, obscuring and falsifying the rest. But his significance always was out of proportion, and I should have been falsifying the scene had I made less of it. And I soon perceived that his influence over me had not really diminished, as, sensing its opposition to my love affair, I’d pretended it had. A secret interior conflict had, in fact, reduced me to my present state, the two conflicting loyalties, which had been tugging in opposite directions till I was practically pulled in half, having ended by immobilizing me altogether.
