by Anna Kavan
I hired a redcap to carry my bag, although it was not especially heavy. Having my bag carried made me feel extravagant. I had the idea that the extravagance was justified in view of the situation. The situation was bad. I had to make an important decision which in itself was a hard thing for me to do, and whichever way I decided the result was bound to be bad. I had to decide whether to continue the struggle with life in America or whether to throw my hand in and start struggling all over again on some other continent. I was going to Connecticut to make the decision because I hoped that I might be able to think more impersonally and calmly in the country. In New York I could not concentrate on anything at all.
ICY GOING ON THE SKYWAY
I couldn’t concentrate long enough even to read a paper in New York City.
The redcap found me a seat in the coach and put my bag on the rack, and the train started off three minutes late by my old wristwatch from Basle.
I sat and looked at the back of the seat in front of me. Green-blue, peacock-blue plush, with a metal band running along the top. The white ticket, eighty-five-cents’-worth of travelling, stuck under the metal band. In England only the first-class tickets were white. No classes here. Just Pullman and coaches. Democracy. Democracy of the democrats. By the democrats. For the democrats. The train went faster. Democracy; democracy; democracy. We ran over some points. Democ, democ, democ.
After a while I looked out of the window. Instead of the blue plush, houses, the electric snake sliding insidiously between gaunt buildings with fire escapes. Then a cemetery. The country opening. A frozen grey pond untidily scuffed with white and hobbledehoy charging figures crouched low over sticks. Black grasses bristling out of whiteness. Festoons of dirtyish ice hung from rocks like soiled cotton wool. A smug antiseptic-looking gargantuan face, every girl’s magazine cover college boyfriend, magnified to the nth degree and thanking God he’s American. I began to feel cold and lonely
CARS HAD TOUGH GOING ON THE PULASKI YESTERDAY
and turned back to the blue plush and submerged myself in stuffy train overheat. Sink. Drown that decision.
The train was slowing down now. I felt the decision bubble to the top of my mind. Gassy bubbles of anxiety bursting through the steam-heated stupefied daze.
AS FREAK NORTHEASTER COVERED ROADWAY WITH SHEET OF ICE
No, I don’t want to think about the decision yet. I put on my fur coat and fastened it carefully and tied my scarf and opened my handbag. Looking at myself in the glass, the eyes looked slightly bloodshot and my face had bad lines under the make-up. Suddenly I began to feel lonely again; a bitter loneliness was making my throat stiffen. God, life is hell when you’ve lost your security, your background.
GREY BLACK CRANE OR HERON WINGS ICED
FORCED TO EARTH ALONG WATERFRONT
Is it possible that this is really happening to me?
PEOPLE WERE SURPRISED AT THE WEATHER
A jolt, cold air coming in, the handle of the suitcase sharp in the palm of my hand.
On the platform the cold flared stark up against my face. I held myself taut and walked straight at it. There was hardly any snow here. Only a neat white line accenting one side of things. Everything looked frozen steel-hard. Metallic hardness bleakly trapped the station buildings. Nothing but grey ice in the sky.
The Drakes had driven in to meet me. Gloria looked pinched. Her heart-shaped, small-featured, flattish face made me think of a small pretty snake caught by the frost. She had on a pair of red corduroy pants and a blue woollen hood with a pompom behind. She gave me a vinegary kind of smile when she said hello. Al looked fine in his checked hunting cap. His brown eyes were bright like a healthy dog’s.
‘You look as if living in the country suited you,’ I said to him.
‘You bet it suits me,’ he said, grinning. ‘It’s a swell life.’
‘The city for me, thank you,’ Gloria said, sourly sweet.
We got into the car and drove down the main street. Gloria wanted to go to a movie. She said, ‘You can hardly prise me out of the house this weather, but once I am out I like to do something just to make sure I’m still alive. I might forget otherwise.’
The movie theatre didn’t open till two thirty. There was an hour to wait. We went into a drugstore to eat. Nobody wanted any of the food that was there. We ate bacon and tomato sandwiches, and a draught came in every time the door opened, and every time this happened Gloria shivered and pursed up her narrow red lips and just did not make a hissing sound. She kept talking about how cold it was in the country and how you might just as well be buried alive as living in that neck of the woods where they were. I was trying to keep my mind off the decision I had to make, off the minutes ducking under the hands of the clock over the counter. ‘I can’t imagine’, Gloria said to me, ‘why you should want to come down here when you’ve got a nice warm Manhattan apartment.’
Finally it was time to go. The cold outside was something unnatural.
COUNTRY SLAPPED IN THE FACE BY BEAUTIFYING
YET MOST DESTRUCTIVE RAIN SLEET AND SNOWSTORMS
CITIZENS HAVE SEEN SINCE NOTORIOUS ICING OF
It seemed to come at one in a steady stream the way ultra-violet rays come out of a doctor’s lamp. The houses looked wizened and shrunk into themselves. It was too cold to think of anything in the street.
For the first few seconds after we got inside, the warmth of the movie theatre was like heaven. To be warm seemed to be all anyone could possibly ask of the world. I saw my reflection hanging in the blank glare of a mirror across the vestibule and noticed the dark lines around my eyes and mouth. Gosh, I thought to myself, what a wreck I’ve turned into lately. New York life is certainly hard to take.
The picture was about the North-West Mounted Police, and it included a great deal of blood and some waving of flags. Now you can have a good time feeling sentimental every time you see the Union Jack, Gloria said. She had a way of speaking that made everything she said seem like a small delicate snake darting its tongue at you.
When she made that remark I stopped following the activities of the North-West Mounted Police and began to think about England, about how I felt about England, if I did feel at all. I remembered a few days back noticing a Rolls-Royce parked by the St Regis and walking around to see if it had a GB plate on the back and feeling happy because it had. I didn’t pay any attention to this incident when it occurred, but recalling it now in the stuffy darkness it struck me as one of the saddest things that had ever happened, a thing almost too pathetic to be endured. It seemed to me to be one of those incidents which, if you happened to see them objectively, would practically break your heart.
STORM-NUMBED PIGEON FOUND WITH FEET FROZEN
TO PARK BENCH AT 62ND STREET AND CENTRAL PARK WEST
I thought I’d already experienced every possible degree of cold, but driving in the dark to the Drakes’ house it was colder still. Gloria was all right in her trousers and fur-lined boots, but I sat and froze in my town clothes. I sat huddled upon the back seat. There was no rug. In five minutes my legs started to feel numb. I bent down and rubbed my ankles through the smooth cold-feeling nylon stockings. Frost kept clouding the windshield faster than the wipers could clear it away. Al drove slowly, skidding on the icy places. In a way I was glad of the cold because it was far too cold to think about anything.
By the time we got to the house I could hardly get out of the car, I was so stiff with cold.
WHEN AL LEVINE RETURNED TO HIS CAR ON
EAST 42ND STREET IT LOOKED LIKE A FROZEN DESSERT
The black sky sagged like a doom over our heads. Suddenly something began to fall out of the sky. Arrows seemed to be falling out of the blackness. While it was in the air it seemed to be long shafts of rain falling down, but as soon as it touched anything it was ice. The sting of it on your face was like whips.
‘Jesus, there’s going to be an ice storm,’ Al said. ‘You two dames get inside while I lock up the car.’
Gloria and I ran for the house,
and the interminable evening began. We had supper and played some records and sat about. The Drakes’ kid played on the floor and made a considerable noise. It was impossible to think. Gloria kept darting her little forked questions at me, wanting to find out what was wrong.
‘I’m thinking of leaving the States,’ I told her.
‘What would you want to do that for?’ she asked.
‘I don’t seem able to cope with life here,’ I said.
‘You’ve done mighty well for yourself, if you ask me,’ Al said. ‘You started cold not long ago, and now you’ve earned some dough and got fixed up in a swell apartment and made a whole lot of friends. Jesus, what more do you want?’
‘You’re spoiled, that’s the trouble with you,’ Gloria said. ‘You’ve always been over-privileged. You don’t know what it is to be really broke like we were when we first came to New York. You haven’t got what it takes to see a thing through unless all the advantages are handed out to you on a plate.’
‘Living alone in a foreign country is what gets me down,’ I said.
‘I don’t understand you,’ Gloria said. ‘If you really feel as badly as you say, how can you be so articulate about everything and write about everything the way you do?’
Al’s dumb animal’s eyes were looking at me.
‘There’s something in that about being on your own,’ he said in his slow way. ‘With Gloria and me now, even when it was tough sledding, we were always a unit. Being broke, well, that was tough. But in a way it wasn’t really tough, because as soon as we got a few bucks I used to go out and buy the biggest goddam beefsteak I could find, and we’d cook it up for ourselves and then we’d be all right.’
‘She’s got Charles backing her,’ Gloria said.
‘Not any more,’ I said.
‘He’ll always let you have money even if he won’t see you,’ she said.
‘Money isn’t everything,’ I said.
UNEXPECTED SLEETSTORM HITS CITY
CAUSES SCORES OF ACCIDENTS AND
‘It’s the hell of a long way towards everything,’ Gloria said.
I got up rather quickly and looked out of the window. It was hot in the room, but there was a fringe of long icy tears suspended outside the window.
KEEPS AMBULANCES BUSY DAY AND NIGHT
God damn your self-pity, I said to myself.
‘Oh, I’ve got no sympathy for you,’ Gloria said.
The evening went on and on. Every now and then Al went to look out. He always came back saying the storm was still going on. We got through the time somehow and went to bed.
In the morning the world had changed into the weirdest and most awful thing I had ever seen. The world was new and difficult to believe. The ice was not falling out of the sky any more, but everything in the world was loaded with ice. Every tree was bowed down with ice, huge branches and here and there whole trees had broken with the weight of ice that encased every twig in a thick and transparent shell.
After breakfast I put on the warmest clothes I could find and went out into that awful desolation. There was no glitter about the ice because the sun did not shine. The sky was still grey and bitter; a heavy mist blocked the end of every perspective like a grey curtain. Absolute stillness. Negation of everything.
It was not easy to walk on the frozen road.
This loneliness, I thought, is my loneliness. I was the only person out in the glacial world. I touched an ice-coffined briar with my hand, and it snapped off, more brittle than a Venetian vase.
I walked on clumsily, slipping on the ice now and then. The big unbroken trees sprayed like unclear fountains towards the mist. Through the centre of each jet of clouded crystal the black branch was threaded. The trees were lovely and frightening to look at. I tried not to feel afraid of the trees. Dear God, let me not start being afraid of things in the natural world. It’s only the human world that is truly fearful.
Most of the telegraph wires were broken, and every wire was encased in about four inches of solid ice. The icy casing of the telegraph wires was toothed like the rows of spikes that are put on the tops of walls to keep people from climbing over, only these spikes pointed downwards. Occasionally a yard or more of the frozen armature would fall from one of the wires which had not given way, and when this happened the crash of the splintering ice on the iron ice of the road was sudden and terrifying like a bomb bursting into the silence.
I came to a plantation of pine trees, each tree bending a different way as if meditating alone. Every pine needle was rigid in ice, and the bowed and bristling trees looked like the arched necks of dragons, of dinosaurs. They were very fantastic-looking shapes. Fantastic and lonely.
Well, I thought, whatever happens I’ll have seen a good deal of what goes on in different places. I’ve certainly been getting around lately. Six times across the equator and a typhoon off Cuba and now an ice storm in Connecticut.
I spent most of the day looking at the appalling and beautiful spectacle of Connecticut under the ice. I felt less bad while I was walking about.
MANAGER OF MAYFLOWER HOTEL DRUGSTORE PLAYS
NURSE TO PIGEON FOUND HALF FROZEN ON PARK BENCH
When it got dark the temperature rose, and the ice started to melt. I had hoped that the frost would hold so that it would be impossible to drive to the station and I should be able to go on walking about the country feeling less and less bad until I was capable of making a reasoned decision.
But when I heard in the night the slow heavy slither of ice on the roof and the rumbling crash as it fell I knew I should have to go back to New York.
The next day Al drove me to the station. The ice was turning to slush on the roads. The trees were all black again. Except that I had seen the ice storm everything was exactly the same for me as it had been in all the days of my indecision.
From the train window I looked at the ruined strangeness, the mess of ice
CITY SLOSHES OUT OF SLEET
in the streets.
It was much too hot in the train. I sat there and was carried back to New York. I didn’t think about anything much or try to decide anything. It seemed to me that I might as well leave everything to chance. Because there were far too many decisions to make about everything and no permanent set of values by which to decide.
ALL SAINTS
LE TOUSSAINT.
Why should there be rats in a new white villa with blue shutters and the Cinzano advertisement? The new house rather narrow and tall like a white shoebox set up on end, the windows symmetrical in front with their blue shutters and the blank side wall painted entirely blue, yellow Cinzano prancing slantwise across. Beautiful blue, blank blue, sky colour, Mary’s colour, blue colour shining with brightness because of the loveliness of our sweet Lady.
But nobody honours the Virgin any more. Only the little girls walking in new white and junket faces to first communion, and not in meditation at that. The Lady is withdrawn, in her blue gown, on the other side of the candles out of which burgeons the brand-new Renault of M. Fortunat.
Let the blueness of the blank wall atone. Let the blue wall atone for what withdraws on the other side. The wirehaired terrier with rickets, brought from the city in a basket to lie in the sunshine, chien de race and worth several thousand francs, several thousand francs worth of hair and bone dying on the small iron balcony between the shutters.
Can the rats see through a blue wall? Do they see those who are there dissembling and the love about to be proffered to oblivion with the dying dog and the red cups white spotted like toadstools and the powdered glass in the Armagnac when the neck of the bottle was broken?
What was that noise like an egg breaking?
an egg breaking
why? and who broke? and where?
Not thrown exactly, not accidentally let fall. Dropped through slotted light and shadow to break on stone, the smooth egg, the symbol (one said, Nirvana is egg-shaped), the complete thing. And then the impact, smashing, the yellow disintegration. A cold tongue of the Haute Te
ch licked the yolk off the rock. Dying by proxy, the consumptive girl, whose life connects with nothing but a thermometer, has dropped into the stream the egg which it was not permitted to leave on the breakfast tray.
That prize the rat dragging his slimy belly in the long grass loses; needing, however, only a little patience for something much more substantial.
What is this? what are you saying? you never say what you are saying.
I’m saying that it’s November and they are selling chrysanthemums, white chrysanthemums for the dead.
I never like white flowers, they remind me of funerals . . . Mr and Mrs Who sit sincerely thank . . . beautiful floral tributes . . . recent sad bereavement . . . O for the grip of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that . . .
In the Lexington undertaking parlour there was a coffin lined with white satin and the cutest little white satin pillow inside with ruffled edges and everything . . .
but right in the window like that with everyone who passed looking at it, it hardly seemed . . .
casket, not coffin, dear . . .
the price included the hire of a dozen gilt chairs, and candles, too, electric presumably . . .
they rouge the cheeks and use lipstick so that you’d never know . . . eau-de-Cologne as well . . . no expense spared . . . it’s wonderful how they think of everything these days.
In all the graveyards the bitter smell of chrysanthemums. Wearing black stockings and crêpe bands and viscerally oppressed by greasy déjeuner processes, the mourners disconsolately loiter through the dank afternoon between jimcrack contraptions of beads and twisted wire commemorating their departed relations. Damp clay clings premonitorily to their boot soles. The smell of rotting vegetation titillates the rheum in their nostrils. Among the soggy stunted leaves of the chrysanthemums decomposition has already set in. Fog drapes clammily the bare chestnut branches, and through the sour slime of the decaying leaves a rat is stealthily sliding.