by Anna Kavan
WHEN my mother died I knew why the house had always been quiet. The house had been waiting and watching from the beginning, listening to the steps my mother danced with her death.
My father never told me about what had happened. No one said anything to me about the death of my mother and I never asked anyone. It was a question which could not possibly ever be asked. But I often wondered. At night, especially, I used to wonder. Sometimes I got afraid in the night, wondering about death and myself and my mother, and wishing that I could ask someone. But of course I knew I would never be able to ask such a question. My mother’s death was the one thing I would never be able to speak of to anyone, no matter how frightened I was. That was the last thing Iz would ever do.
DAY TIME. Night time. Night the dark time: the time for wonder; the time for the question in daylight not to be spoken.
The question starts under the chest of drawers. At first it’s impossible to be sure; there’s still the chance that it may be something else. Perhaps a moth is attacking the thick winter sweater that’s kept in the bottom drawer. The tough coarse ropes of wool are almost too much for him, but he won’t give in, he won’t admit that it’s one too many for him, he tussles on in really heroic style, not taking abrasions and setbacks into any account at all. Or perhaps a beetle is boring into the wood. The bottom drawer sticks, it has to be pulled quite hard before it will open, and after a specially sharp tug a sprinkle of powdery shavings falls from the soft wood. A worm or a beetle could certainly dig himself in very cosily there; and without having to work unduly hard either.
However, it is not a moth in the bottom drawer, it isn’t a beetle, it isn’t the floor-boards stretching themselves in the dark. It’s the question moving under the chest of drawers. It moves a little way on its belly, then craftily keeps still for a while like a tiger waiting to spring. Like a tiger the question crouches under the chest of drawers; a tiny tiger about the size of a mouse, and its striped coat black as velvet instead of tawny. Now it’s moving again, flattened against the floor. Out in the room it crouches, expanding, accumulating its force. Soon it will be ready to pounce; its muscles bunch and ripple fearfully inside its skin. Larger and larger it grows: easily, beautifully, the tautened muscles levitate, launch the dark body into the air. The awful, lovely, stylized bow of the spring; effortless, almost languid, inevitable.
Where? Not the bright upstairs room that the morning shines through?
Mirror bevels, catching the sunlight, spit prisms so brilliant they seem cut out of rainbow diamonds. Held in a medallion of net-filtered sun, a white tallboy with elaborate mouldings; ornate, capacious and expensively Edwardian. Drawers glide silently in and out with glimpses of rolled stockings, gloves, blouses, underwear. The garments are lacy or hand-embroidered, there are scent sachets and lavender bags in the comers of the drawers. A travelling clock in its open morocco case chimes a light silver sound. Fluted silver candlesticks, crested, at the mantelpiece ends: the candles in them are pink. Monogrammed silver brushes and boxes yield smothered prismatic gleams. They are laid out on a wide white dressing-table in the bay window. The dressing-table matches the tallboy, the drawer fronts and the frame of the oval mirror criss-crossed with moulded ribbons and wreaths, the table-top, under its glittery paraphernalia, covered by a runner embroidered with pink roses. A similar flowered cloth on the table beside the bed, with a vase of carnations, bottle of Eno’s fruit salts, harmless pillbox and water carafe arranged on a silver tray, all very clear in the sun. The net-curtained light coming through the window is candidly and peaceably laid over the, pale, shiny, smooth satin bedspread. The sunlit effect is not sharp and not harsh, but insistent enough to give a frank innocuousness, openness, to everything in the room.
The door shuts on this and opens again, slowly, under the same ringed hand which we have seen already. A enters the same room; the only change is that now the sun is setting. Red sunset light fills the room so that it seems to be floating inside a druggist’s beaker of coloured water. Red in this sunset danger-light, her head held back tensely, the neck muscles tensing, the fragile exposed curve of the vulnerable white neck, taut, a vulnerable flower-stalk in the red room. With quick red springing wide and away from the neck, a vaporous darkening within the room, the silver suddenly blackened, the window rusted. The left hand leaps to the throat, convulsing, and flashing its dulled ring. Red sprays and stipples the bedspread with the delicacy of fine rain. Red cascades mistily from the open drawers of the tallboy, gingerly spreading fanwise over the whole floor, creeping towards the door
which opens and closes softly and carefully under A’s hand as she goes out.
She closes the door with abstracted and almost tender attention, walking slowly away. It’s a narrow gallery that she steps out into, a gallery running round three sides of a hall. Everything is very dark, the only light comes from an antique lantern down in the body of the hall which grudgingly emits a dusty glimmer through its horn windows. The gallery is in deepest shade. The panelling, the row of shut doors, are really nothing but guess-work. The hall roof is as high as a church, it wouldn’t be out of place to see bats flitting about, or an owl roosting up on one of the rafters. The main part of the hall, down where the light is, presents a queer conflict between the florid and the austere. The bare lofty walls, the grim perspectives of shadow, the uncurtained and ecclesiastically shaped windows, have a severe monastic look. But this asceticism doesn’t agree at all with the arsenic-green carpet, or with the sumptuous thronelike chair, glowing with scarlet silk under the lantern. The two colours, the arsenical carpet, the scarlet chair, the only visible colours, bum with the suppressed, dangerous intensity, the theatrical violence, with which occasional colours are over-emphasized in the usually neutral-tinted dream scene. There is a chemical suggestion about these tints, reminiscent of fires examined through smoked glass. One feels that they are too strong to be faced without some sort of screen.
A man is sitting in the chair, closely occupied with papers which he can barely see to read. Papers are stacked on a small table beside him: papers are in his hands, on his knees. Because of the position in which he is sitting, bent over his work, it’s quite impossible to distinguish clearly anything about him. (But it’s a pretty safe bet that he’s the man who on a previous dream occasion was too busy to notice that his daughter wanted to ask him for his support.)
The general effect produced by all this is sinister and at the same time slightly phony. What really introduces the sinister element is that the dramatic trappings are somehow unconvincing. The massive walls might quite possibly be made of paper, the whole place might taper off into a flimsy tangle of wires and screens just out of eyeshot. And yet nothing positively suggests this. It’s simply the ominous dream-feeling that appearances may suddenly slip out of themselves into something entirely different.
Visual reality might here be only a mask held in front of the face of some much more frightening reality in another dimension.
And this applies too in some way to A who, wrapped in a long dark garment, slowly starts to walk down the stairs. She is aware of the man sitting near the lamp without being disturbed by his presence. She walks quietly, but without making any special effort to avoid his notice; anyway, he is too far off to hear her. He is much farther away than he could possibly be. Glancing at him, her face is depersonalized, the face of someone seen in a photograph. When she gets to the foot of the stairs, coming into the lamp’s radius, the shadows of the bannisters fall on her in successively widening strokes, like the flails of a threshing machine. At the foot of the stairs she stands still. She now has to embark on the arsenic sea, incandescent with mineral fires. It’s a hard step for her to take. (Why are these endings called acts of weakness?) She stands on the last stair, her hand on the carved newel-post.
She puts one foot in front of her. As her foot touches the carpet, the newel-post, very abnormally tall and massive, rears up behind her like a black tree. In an instantaneous flash-back of association comes t
he vaguely disturbing sensation of déjà-vue——Has this happened already ... where ...?
A takes a step forward; then another. She goes on to a door at the left of the lantern: that it is an outer door is shown by its numerous heavy fastenings; but the bolts are not bolted, the iron chain is hanging unhooked.
(For a fractional moment, far off in the sea of universal identity, the slave, broken by torture, gravely and quietly speaking his antique wisdom: Is there smoke in the room? If only a little I will remain; but if it is a very great smoke I will go out. For that door is always open. Slow smoke rising solemn and funnel-shaped, as from a censer, conceals him, drifts him away.)
A has only to turn the handle in order to go out. As she proceeds to do this, there is a perceptible increase in tension. She is set on holding herself aloof and dedicated to her purpose. She seems now definitely not to wish to attract the notice of the man sitting near. Nevertheless, there is a moment, just before she turns the handle, when something forces her to look at him, she even seems to make an unspoken appeal, though cynically without hope, as if to the indifferent and insensitive masses who understand nothing, see nothing. He, not absolutely unconscious, shuffles his documents, moves his feet on the carpet, roughening the bright pile. As tension accumulates, he looks up with a reluctant, resentful, only incipiently-aware expression. Does he hear something unusual? Is it raining outside? Has the wind got up suddenly? He doesn’t see A. He would have to turn his head right over his shoulder to get her into his field of vision. For a few seconds he is restless, more irritated by the interference with his concentration than anything else. Soon he brushes the whole intangible interruption aside and goes on reading.
A slowly turns the door handle. And this door too she shuts very carefully and quietly behind her as she goes out into the garden of THE ELMS, where the gardener is cutting the edge of the grass with a pair of long-handled shears. She stands on the lawn quite close to him, watching the snipped grass blades fall on the gravel. She has the air of wishing to know with some part of her attention just how the shears are manipulated: but from this fractional escape her real ego stands always dissociated. The gardener does not look up. He wears an old soft-brimmed straw hat, his back is stiff, his head bent, the snicking rhythm of the shears does not hesitate.
While he stolidly goes on clipping, a car pulls up in front of the porch, the chauffeur gets out and rings the bell, the suburban lady steps down from the car, the maid comes to open the door of the house. These four people, the visitor, the gardener, the chauffeur, the maid, each wearing a similar mask-face under straw hat, hat with bird in it, peaked cap, muslin cap, are grouped together a few yards from A. The tableau holds in suspense while all the masks slowly swing towards A and remain fixed. Fright starting to appear on her face, A looks from one to the other, turns round, hurries away. As she goes out of the gate, the branches of the elms at each side reach out fumbling at her, their long arms fingered with groping leaves. A leaf falls: she begins running; others fall. Magnified, not in size but in prominence, dead leaves eddy to-and-fro on the ground, cluster in dusty drifts, scamper singly away.
And against a lead sky the bare tree-tops are labouring.
Are you afraid of the tigers? Do you hear them padding all round you on their fierce fine velvet feet?
The speed of the growth of tigers in the nightland is a thing which ought to be investigated some time by the competent authority. You start off with one, about the size of a mouse, and before you know where you are he’s twice the size of the Sumatra tiger which defeats all comers in that hemisphere. And then, before you can say Knife (not a very tactful thing to say in the circumstances anyhow), all his boy and girl friends are gathered round, your respectable quiet decorous docile night turns itself into a regular tiger-garden. Wherever you look, the whole night is full of tigers leaping and loping and grooming their whiskers and having a wonderful time at your expense. There isn’t a thing you can do about it apparently.
The wilder the tricks of the tigers, the more abandoned their games and gambols, the more diversely dreadful become the dooms of the unfortunate A in this dream. Her fugitive shape, black-swathed, vanishes at the end of every cul-de-sac. Through the cities of the world she pursues her fate, in streets where the dead eyes of strangers are no colder than the up-swarming lights which have usurped the brilliance of the stars. From shrouded platforms among the clouds she hurtles down. She plunges from towers strict and terrible in their stark fragile strength, delicate as jerboa’s bones on the sky, perdurable with granite and steel. Slumped on his stained bar, Pete the Greek, beneath flyblown Christmas festoons which no one will ever remove, hears the screaming skid of wheels spouting slush with her blood. Limp as an old coat not worth a hanger, she is to be found behind numbered doors in hotel bedrooms; or dangling from the trees of country churchyards where leaning tombstones like feeble-minded ghosts mop and mow in the long summer grass. The weeds of lonely rivers bind her with clammy skeins; the tides of tropical oceans suck off her shoes; crabs scuttle over her eye sockets. Sheeted and anonymous on rubbered wheels she traverses the interminable bleakness of chloroform-loaded corridors. The sardonic yap of the revolver can be taken as the full stop arbitrarily concluding each ambiguous sentence.
An erratic but steadfast seeking, saraband and stalking of death by violence through the indifferent world. The dance enters upon a movement of weariness, desperation, finale. Just what its form, gesture and detail being variable and in no way permanent. For the occasion may be supposed a town house of a particular type, in an unfashionable, cheap district, a lodging-house possibly. There will be the area, spearheaded railings, crammed dustbins vomiting refuse; the street air stale in the unsweet warm evening; grimy, strident-voiced children, tired and cantankerous, quarrelling at their play. The house door, in need of painting, shabbily formal like a neglected and desecrated altar beneath the fanlight carrying the street number; perhaps a small bed-and-breakfast sign at one side. Inside, the hall, narrow, in gloom, worn linoleum double-tracked towards stairs and basement; a smell here of unappetizing meals, cabbage water and of the mackintosh hooked to the hatrack. A glazed pottery drainpipe, painted with bulrushes, used as umbrella-stand.
The staircase plods upwards, flagging at every flight, the creaking treads sustained by dirt-coloured felt, trampled threadbare. At the top the back bedroom, dismal with furniture discards from many rooms; cluttered with glasses, cups, empty whisky and gin bottles; syringes, scattered tablets, powders spilled from their crumpled papers, needles, empty tubes labelled diamorph., etc., litter the floor. At the sash window, the dingy scum-white lace with the entangled light strangling meanly in it: on the brass bedstead, huddled bedclothes in disorder, beneath which the stiff, frightening shape of some human form can barely, inexorably, be discerned. A wicked black frieze of cowls and chimney-pots beyond the lightly air-sucked curtain, jagged angles of roofs and gables iron-sharp on the sky. The vacant, exhausted sky, like an old shell.
MY mother’s death made no difference to the house except that she herself was no longer in it. At least her outward presence had gone away. Her sadness and her boredom stayed in the quiet rooms where I lived alone with shadows. As if they felt lonely, these two ghosts attached themselves to me and entered my night-time world. Sometimes I thought they had taken me for my mother, and I felt nearer to her through their nearness. Sometimes it seemed as if her departure had brought her too near. Sometimes her nearness was like a hand on my shoulder; then I felt frightened, and ran and jumped and turned somersaults even, trying to shake off her hand. But the hand always stayed on my shoulder as long as it wished to.
Sometimes, looking out of an upstairs window, I could feel my mother looking out of my eyes. Like people who from a bridge watch fish swimming below them, we saw the outside world as an alien element where we could take no part. Isolated behind the glass of our lonely window we looked down on the daily life which was not for us.
SHOUTING AND SINGING and hullooing his satellites
the gregarious sun comes ranting upon the collective stage. After so many billion repetitions you might expect him to be getting the least bit perfunctory: but not he; no sirree. Like a conscientious actor determined to give the public full value for money, he rampages through his performance as enthusiastically as the first time he put on the act. Of course the rest of the cast plays up to him. The clouds jump to their opening positions, hurriedly snatching the gaudy properties of the cooperative scarf dance. On earth ocean bellows to ocean across the continents like allied commanders exchanging a salute of guns. The mutual greetings of the archipelagoes are more intime.
As the sunwaves break over the roof of the jungle, flocks of parrots burst upward from the dark teeming mass like an explosion of rockets. The monkey village yawns, fornicates, pinches, scratches, chatters itself awake. In honeycombed caves the glow-worms conglomerate starrily. In linked caves, between clotted stalactites, the bats hang themselves up together. The gentle pandas in their dainty dress indulge in party frolics among the rocks.
At sea it’s the same thing: whales, porpoises, dolphins, flying fish, mackerel, sprats, all travelling in schools and shoals; oyster-beds packed to capacity; animalcula and foraminifera swarming in astronomical multitudes.
Higher up the scale there’s no difference either. The tribal community rouses itself en masse. Everyone begins laughing and talking and praying and crying and cooking and washing and working on top of everyone else. The baskets of the fighting-cocks are placed close together for company’s sake. Paying the civilized penalty, Mr. Whosit awakens flimsily divided from the tens or hundreds of rabbits inhabiting his particular warren. Quick the switch and the dial, then, to bring loud the voices of nations; quick the collar and tie, quick the pants of respectability, the shined shoes to run to the crowded eating-places, the streets, the buses, the trains, cars, planes, offices, parks, night-clubs, theatres, hospitals, churches, graveyards, tombs.