Machines in the Head

by Anna Kavan

  I had a friend, a lover. It was a dream.

  THE END IN SIGHT

  IT IS THREE DAYS since I received the official notification of my sentence; three days that have passed like shadows, like dreams.

  The letter came through the post in the ordinary way and arrived by the afternoon delivery. Curiously enough, I was feeling more cheerful that afternoon than I had felt for a long time. The sun was shining, it was a lovely, calm day, one of those premature spring days which sometimes come to encourage us towards the end of a long, hard winter. The beautiful weather made me decide to go out; it really seemed shameful to stay shut up indoors with one’s worries when the outside world was full of sunshine and life. I went across the fields towards the wood on the hill. This has always been a favourite walk of mine, and as I went I was astonished to think how long it was since I had last been that way and how my habits had changed, how I myself had altered, since the case started against me.

  The colours of the landscape were as if washed pure and true in the transparent, windless light; vivid new sproutings like chilly flames appeared here and there in the hedges; the boughs of the trees were clouded with purplish buds. From the old yew on the hillside, disturbed by my footsteps, emerged with their strangely silent sure flight the two brown owls which I watched like old friends. Walking back to the house I made a resolution to go out more in future, not to stay indoors aimlessly brooding but to make the most of the natural world and to identify myself with non-human things, since they at least held no threat over me.

  Oh, if only I’d known what I should find when I went inside my door! But no premonition warned me of what was coming; on the contrary, as I’ve said, I felt more optimistic than I’ve felt since goodness knows when. I remember that as I crossed the garden from the field gate I was thinking about a man named David P whom I had met some time previously, a man who was in the same position as I was, waiting to hear the result of his case, and whose tranquil, courageous bearing under conditions of almost intolerable strain had aroused my admiration. ‘How do you manage to keep so calm all the time?’ I had asked him, half believing that he must be in possession of some inside information or perhaps had influence in official quarters. And I had remarked, too, on the fact that he alone of all the accused people I had ever met, wore an unanxious, almost happy expression.

  ‘Oh, well, one doesn’t gain anything by worrying, does one?’ he had answered me. ‘You may be sure that all the worrying in the world isn’t going to affect the final issue for us. In fact, I’m inclined to believe that the less we think about our cases the better: if one has confidence in one’s adviser one can safely leave everything to him. As for looking cheerful, there’s still a lot left in life that we can enjoy. The great secret, in my opinion, is to concentrate on the things which can’t be taken away from one – the past, for instance, and trees, and poetry . . .’ Of course, I had often thought of this conversation before, but only now – and how ironic that realization should have come just then! – did I seem to realize the personal application of what David had said.

  With these thoughts occupying my mind I went into the house. The afternoon post had come, and the letters were still lying on the floor where they had fallen when the postman pushed them through the slit in the door. I bent down to pick them up. At first there seemed to be nothing of interest, only a circular and one or two bills or receipts. But then, half hidden by a bulb catalogue, I saw the pale-blue official envelope; I felt the familiar stiffness of the paper in my hand, and my heart quickened its beat.

  Right up to that moment I had no suspicion of what the letter contained. From time to time, ever since my case started, these pale-blue documents have descended upon me, sometimes with a form to be filled in, sometimes with an ambiguous message or with an extract from some incomprehensible blue book, and I, unsuspectingly, took this for another communication of the same kind. Even when I had torn open the envelope and read through the paper enclosed I failed at the start to take in the meaning of the words.

  It can’t be true – someone’s playing a joke on me, I thought, as the import of the sentences slowly penetrated my mind. Surely this isn’t how it’s done – through the post – in this casual way . . . ? Surely they’d at least send somebody – a messenger . . . But then a curious vibration, like running water, seemed to flow over the walls. I saw the walls leaning nearer, as if watchfully. I knew very well that the letter was not a trick, and I was glad that I was alone in the hall with only the walls watching to see my face.

  That was what happened three days ago. Since then time has passed in an unreal flux. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, the final blow will fall; I know that I have, at the most, another week or ten days. What is the correct behaviour for a condemned person? – the authorities have never sent me a pamphlet containing that information! Sometimes I feel almost relieved to think that it is all over, that the suspense is finished at last. At other times it seems to me that I am quite incapable of realizing that this is the end. I look at the elm trees over which the thickening buds have flung a soft purple bloom, and it seems incredible that I shall not even see the leaves as big as the ears of mice. No, no – it’s simply absurd – it can’t be true . . . It’s somebody else who has received the fatal pale-blue notification – perhaps David P. He would know how to behave in such circumstances; he would bear philosophically and with fortitude the sentence I am not brave enough even to contemplate.

  I am constantly aware of the heart beating inside my breast, strongly and resolutely pumping the blood through my veins. Once I read somewhere that when the blood is thin it wants to return whence it came. But my blood is not thin; my blood does not want to fall back. Unbearable reluctance of the blood that will not fall! How many, dying on the scaffold, must have suffered this unspeakable punishment, not to be justified by any penal code.

  Yesterday afternoon I lay down on the couch in my living-room. I had scarcely slept at all the previous night, and I felt I must rest a little. But I had hardly put my head on the cushions when a voice seemed to shout in my ear, ‘What, are you going to waste an hour with your eyes closed when perhaps this is their last hour for seeing anything?’

  I jumped up, and like a demented person, like someone driven by furies, I hurried through the rooms of the house, hurried into the garden and into the fields, straining my eyes to appreciate every detail, straining to store up within my brain the images of all these things which are so soon to be hidden from me for ever. Later on, quite exhausted, I went into the inn for a drink, but no sooner was the glass in my hand than I felt an impulse to throw it away, unwilling to dim even with a single drop of alcohol the sharp vision of what might be the last scene upon which I should ever look.

  People were there whom I knew. They laughed and spoke together about the coming summer and what they would do in the long summer days. How could I stay and listen to their talk, knowing that while they are carrying out the plans made so carelessly I shall be far from every activity? And how can I stay at home, either, answering the questions of the gardener about seeds for the summer and hearing the chatter of my little girl who knows nothing of what is happening to me and who also talks of the future, of the summer, and of what we will do together?

  The hours pass, some slowly, some like flashes of light, but each one leading me inexorably nearer to the end. Incredulous, I watch the hours pass without bringing any reprieve. ‘Isn’t anyone going to do anything, then?’ I want to cry out. ‘Isn’t anything going to happen to save me? They can’t let me be destroyed like this. A message must come to say it was all a mistake. Somebody must do something.’

  But no one around me even knows what is going on. Only the dog seems to sense that all is not well with me. And when, just now, unable to bear my sufferings any longer in silence, I whispered to him, ‘Oh, Tige, I’ll soon have to leave you – this dreadful thing is really going to happen to me – nothing will save me now,’ I saw a dimness like tears in his lustrous brown eyes.

  T
HERE IS NO END

  ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

  If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

  If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

  Even there shall thy hand lead me.’

  I CAN’T THINK PROPERLY these days, I find it difficult to remember, but I suppose those words were written about Jehovah, although they apply just as well to my enemy – if that is what I should call him.

  ‘If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.’ That particular phrase rings in my brain with a horrid aptness, for certainly I have made my bed in hell, and certainly he is here with me. He is near all the time, although I do not see him. Only sometimes, very early in the morning before it has got light, I seem to catch a glimpse of a half-familiar face peering in at the window; but it is always snatched away so quickly that I have no time to recognize it. And just once, one evening, the door of my room was suddenly opened a little way and somebody glanced in through the crack, glanced in, and then passed hurriedly out of sight down the corridor. Perhaps that was he.

  Why does he keep his eye on me like this now that he has accomplished his purpose and brought about my destruction? It can’t be to make sure that I don’t escape; oh no, there’s no possibility of that, he need not have the slightest fear. Is it just to gloat over my ruin? But, no, I don’t think that’s the reason, either, for if that were so he would come more often and at times more humiliating to me when I am in the deepest despair.

  Somehow I have the impression from those vague glimpses I have caught of his face that it wears a look that is not vindictive but kindred, almost as though he were related closely to me by some similarity of brain or blood. And of late the idea has come to me – fantastic enough, I admit – that possibly after all he is not my personal enemy but a sort of projection of myself, an identification of myself with the cruelty and destructiveness of the world. On a planet where there is so much natural conflict may there not very well exist in certain individuals an overwhelming affinity with frustration and death? And may this not result in an actual materialization, a sort of eidolon moving about the world?

  I have thought a lot about such matters of late, sitting here and looking out of the window. For, strangely enough, there are windows without bars in this place and doors which are not even locked. Apparently there is nothing to prevent me from walking out whenever I feel inclined. Yet, although there is no visible barrier, I know only too well that I am surrounded by unseen and impassable walls which tower into the highest domes of the zenith and sink many miles below the surface of the earth.

  So it has come upon me, the doom too long awaited, the end without end, the bannerless triumph of the enemy who, after all, appears to be close as a brother. Already it seems to me that I have spent a lifetime in this narrow room whose walls will continue to regard me with secrecy through innumerable lifetimes to come. Is it life, then, or death, stretching like an uncoloured stream behind and in front of me? There is no love here, nor hate, nor any point where feeling accumulates. In this nameless place nothing appears animate, nothing is close, nothing is real; I am pursued by the remembered scent of dust sprinkled with summer rain.

  Outside my window there is a garden where nobody ever walks, a garden without seasons, for the trees are all evergreens. At certain times of the day I can hear the clatter of footsteps on the concrete covered ways which intersect the lawns, but the garden is always deserted, set for the casual appreciation of strangers, or else for the remote and solitary contemplation of eyes defeated like mine. In this impersonal garden, all neatness and vacancy, there is no arbour where friends could linger but only concrete paths along which people walk hurriedly, inattentive to the singing of birds.

  PALACE OF SLEEP

  THE WIND WAS BLOWING like mad in the hospital garden. It seemed to know that it was near a mental hospital and was showing off some crazy tricks of its own, pouncing first one way and then another and then apparently in all directions at once. The mad wind sprang out with a bellow from behind a corner of the nurses’ quarters, immediately tearing around the back of the building to meet itself halfway along the front in a double blast that nearly snatched the cap from the head of a sister hurrying towards the entrance. With a clash and a clatter the door swung to admit her indignant figure huddled in its blue cloak. The wind came in, too, with a malicious gusto that died drearily in the recesses of the hall where the two doctors were talking.

  The physician in charge glanced around as if he resented the unceremonious way the wind burst into his hospital. He was a man of about sixty-five, with a red cheerful face and white hair. Magnanimously passing over the wind’s interruption, he went on with the story he was telling.

  ‘When I went in next morning she was trying to tear up the sheet. So I said to her in a quiet, friendly way, “Don’t you think that’s rather a silly thing to do?” And she answered me back as quick as lightning, “If I can’t do silly things here, I’d like to know where I can do them.” ’ The red face creased into a net of jovial lines; the broad shoulders shook with laughter. ‘Pretty smart, wasn’t it?’

  The young doctor echoed the laugh politely. He was a visitor from the north who was being shown around the hospital. Himself a reticent man, he wished that the superintendent were a little less genial and expansive. So much good humour aroused in him some disquietude, some slight distrust. He turned his lean, sensitive face, and his eyes rested reflectively on the other for a moment. What they saw was not altogether reassuring. There was something which they found faintly suspect about the appearance of the elderly man. His hair was too white, his face was too genial, his expression was too optimistic. He looked more like a country parson than a psychiatrist.

  The visitor looked at his watch and said tentatively, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t much time left. I think you were going to show me the paying block – ?’

  ‘Yes, yes. The paying block. You must certainly see that before you go. We’re very proud of our private wards.’

  The swing doors clashed behind the two men, who lowered their heads against the attack of the wind. The wind leaped madly upon them, with malice, with joy, as they walked on the covered way that crossed the impersonal garden. In the empty flower beds the earth lay saturated and black, the wintry looking acid-green grass rippled under the wind, the bare trees lashed their branches complainingly.

  The two doctors walked briskly along side by side, the one tall, contemplative, reserved, turned in upon himself against the onslaught of wind, the other with white hair blowing about and a look of determined good nature which seemed to set the seal of his approval upon the rough weather.

  The long brick building felt quiet as a vacuum after the windy tumult outside. The superintendent paused for a moment inside the door, smoothing his beautiful white hair with his fingers. He was slightly breathless.

  ‘Welcome to the palace of sleep,’ he said with his cheerful smile, speaking and smiling partly for the benefit of a young nurse who was passing by. ‘All the patients in this wing are having partial or prolonged narcosis,’ he went on in a more confidential tone as the girl disappeared through one of the many doors.

  The wide corridor was coldly and antiseptically white, with a row of doors on the left and windows on the opposite side. The windows were high and barred and admitted a discouraging light that gleamed bluishly on the white distemper like a reflection of snow. Some grey rubber composition which deadened sound covered the floor. A handrail ran along the wall under the high windows.

  One of the doors further down the corridor opened, and a nurse emerged, supporting a woman in a red dressing-gown. The patient swayed and staggered in spite of the firm grip that guided her hand to the rail. Her head swung loosely from side to side, her wide-open eyes, at once distracted and dull like the eyes of a drunken person, stared out of her pale face, curiously puffy and smooth under dark hair
projecting in harsh, disorderly elf-locks. Her feet, clumsy and uncontrolled in their woollen slippers, tripped over the hem of her long nightdress and threw her entire weight on the nurse’s supporting arm.

  ‘Hold up, Topsy,’ the probationer said in a tolerant, indifferent voice just perceptibly tinged with impatience, speaking as if to an awkward child. She hoisted her companion upright, and the pair continued their laborious progress towards the bathroom, the sick woman stumbling and reeling and gazing desperately, blankly ahead, the nurse watchful, abstracted and humming a dance tune under her breath.

  ‘That patient will finish her treatment in another day or two,’ the physician-in-charge told the visitor. ‘Of course, she won’t remember anything that’s happened to her during the period of narcosis. She’s practically unconscious now, although she can manage to walk after a fashion.’

  He continued to discuss technicalities as they moved together along the corridor. The young man listened and answered somewhat mechanically, his eyes troubled, disturbed by what they had seen.

  A door opened as the two doctors were passing it, and the red-faced senior paused to speak to the nurse who was coming out, holding an enamel tray covered with a cloth from beneath which emanated the nauseous stench of paraldehyde. He noticed the other man’s instinctive recoil, and his face wrinkled into its jolly folds.

  ‘Don’t you like our local perfume, then? We’re so used to the smell of PR here that we hardly notice it. Some of the patients say they actually get to like it in time.’

  They went into the room, which was heavy with the same sickening odour. Under the white bedspread pulled straight and symmetrical, like the covering of a bier, a young woman was lying quite motionless with closed eyes. Her fair hair was spread on the pillow; her pale face was absolutely lifeless, void, with the peculiar glazed smoothness and eye sockets darkly circled. The superintendent stood at the bedside looking down at this shape which already seemed to have forfeited humanity and given itself over prematurely to death. His face wore a complacent expression, gratified, approving; the look of a man well satisfied with his work.