I Am Lazarus (Peter Owen Modern Classic)

by Anna Kavan

  Faster and faster he ran to escape from the tunnel and the tolling noise of the bell. And at last he was outside, the tunnel was getting smaller and smaller until it vanished, and there was respite from the tolling, nothing left now but the room with the doctor quietly smoking, sunshine outside the window, the calendar on the wall.

  The boy was not lying on the couch any more but bending over with hunched shoulders as if hiding from something, his head on his raised knees in the posture a person might take crouching under a table: and though he was crying he was no longer thinking of the tunnel or of the dangerous secret thing which had scared him so terribly, or about anything he could have put into any words.

  ‘It was like a blackout. A blackout. I can't remember,’ he kept on hopelessly mumbling, amongst the tears.

  GLORIOUS BOYS

  WHY do I do this? she thought, walking with Mia in the cold London dark vibrant with the resonance of out-going bombers. Why do I ever go to a party, not knowing what to say or what to do with myself? Hands were easy with glasses and cigarettes, but the rest of the body, embarrassingly material, intractable, and absolutely unwilling to dissolve itself into a dew; how did one cope with it? How did one recognize the correct moment for putting it into a chair, opening its mouth and emitting appropriate sounds, propping it against the end of a sofa, getting it up and moving it across the room to confront some stranger's alarmingly expectant, or self-assured, and in every case utterly inaccessible countenance?

  The terrifying independence of the body. Its endless opposition. The appalling underground movements of the nerves, muscles, viscera, upon which, like a hated and sadistic gauleiter, one unremittingly imposed an implacable repressive regime, threatened eternally by the equally implacable threat of insubordination. The perpetual fear of being sabotaged into some sudden shameful exposure.

  Ahead the house waited uncompromising, the imminent dark objective. Why did I come here?

  It was Mia, naturally, who had brought her. Mia, like a little infanta, like a little fantastic princess, not quite human exactly, daughter, not of a golden shower, but of a black-pearl passion, smoky dark hair and cheeks the lustrous blurred pink of the inside of those very elaborate shells, bright dress and improbable buckled shoes. Mia shooting her arrowy kindness not of earth or humanity into the heart: no warmth but only darting gleams from the progeny of a pearl. Why was I persuaded?

  Can't say no, she was thinking while Mia opened the door and the noise, the special noise, smell, atmosphere, of a party came down to them from the top of the short white staircase leading directly into the large light smoky room. Can't say no; non specific depressive trait. The tedium of these everlasting psychological pigeonholes. And it wasn't true in her case either; at least, not entirely true. It wasn't only slackness, weak moral fibre, whatever you liked to call it. There was that other thing too, the force always driving one to open every door, cross every bridge, walk up every gangway.

  They added their coats to the winter coats already piled and slipping from hidden pieces of furniture at the foot of the stairs. Now I would like to stop here for a little, the back of her mind reflected. Now I would like to spend a little time with the coats, knowing them, knowing their different characters, textures, smells, getting the feel through my fingers of the essential essence of coat, getting to know how it feels to be fur or tweed. But it won't do. Or rather, it isn't done. It simply is not done in normal society to waste time feeling oneself into a pile of coats. Odd how normal people have no time except for other people. Unless you're alone it's practically impossible ever to get to know the non-human things: it simply isn't allowed. There's something queer about you, people said if you tried to explain.

  ‘Let's go in now,’ the little clear voice of Mia said, rather high, like some blithe warm-country-frequenting bird; the jewelled kinglet, perhaps?

  ‘I'm ready,’ she said.

  The preliminary staircase was much too short. Through introductions she was still back there on the stairs watching Mia's newly combed hair floating so fine and like a darker smoke on the cigarette smoke thickened air. The dark downward smoke drifted past backs and bosoms; with confident and infrangible sprightliness the buckled shoes twinkled into the crowd.

  The party, she said to herself, following on reluctant. I must be in the party. No more dreaming now. She had always dreamed too much in her life, dreamed when she ought to have been attending to people, and so lost all the prizes and antagonized everyone.

  She thought how she had antagonized Frank by dreaming herself into this that seemed a crazy journey to him, to this country, away from safety and warmth, all across the world. She thought about being alone in the raid on the night she arrived, the night the post office was hit. She had stood watching out in the street, and while the big building burned, and she was feeling the anguish of exploded walls, burst roof, tom girders wrenching away, smoke, flames, blinding up, spouting up through the crazy avalanching of stone, the crashing, ruinous death of all that mass of stone and durability struck down with a single blow, a warden had shouted to her from the post not to stand woolgathering but to get under cover away from the shell splinters that were coming down. There had been rage in his voice to blast her out of the dream. But the warden's anger and Frank's anger couldn't be helped and were irrelevant really, since she knew she could never cure herself of the woolgathering.

  The man talking to her now had a red face and his hair was curly, sandy and grey mixed, like wool.

  If only he doesn't start asking questions, she thought. If only he doesn't know or care that I've only been over here a few months. If only I don't have to try and say something convincing. As she was merely doing her own work and was not on a war assignment, people wondered why she had come all that difficult voyage from the safe underside of the world. For the questions which followed then she had no adequate answers. All her life the force had been operative in her, the insistent unknown thing that drove her to open the doors, to walk up the gangways, to leave security when it became familiar, in no spirit of gallant adventure, but terrified; though the terror, certainly, was inside the dream where also the inexorable voice commanded, Move on there, traveller; other places, experiences, wait for investigation. It was obvious that no explanation was possible.

  Someone gave her a glass with punch in it, hot and faintly steaming, and she felt the comfortable warmth of the glass in her hand and lifted the glass and smelled the sweet, warm, raffish smell of the rum which had a curl of apple peel floating in it. There were lighted candles about the room and silver stars because it was Christmas time.

  ‘They've got some interesting pictures here,’ she said. And because it was all right and allowed to be interested in pictures and to get to know them she moved over to stand in front of the canvas, pale bird's egg sea, sand, and a pink house – it looked like a Christopher Wood, and the woolly man moved too and looked for a moment and murmured and moved away, set free to talk to some more congenial guest.

  What exactly is it that's wrong with me? What is the thing about me that people never can take? her thoughts wandered, although she knew the answer perfectly well. It was the woolgathering, of course, the preoccupation with non-human things, the interest in the wrong place, that was so unacceptable. People took it as an insult. Intuitively they resented it even if they were unaware of it. And fundamentally they were right; it was insulting from their point of view. But why did she care what they felt? There was nothing to be done anyway. The woolgathering was far stronger than she was.

  She stood and looked at the picture a little; gradually, as she saw no one noticing her, allowing her eyes to stray to less approved objects, the candelabra, the stars, the pagodas on the long yellow curtains. A carnation pinned to a dress with the coloured badge of a regiment came between, and behind this the known and utterly unlikely face from another country suddenly sprang out at her in the room like a pistol pointed over the noise and smoke and the atmosphere of a party and for a second she felt cold and confused
with the countries running wildly together.

  Then he came forward, blocking out the carnation and standing in front in the blue flying uniform that was different only in the word on the shoulder from the uniform an English pilot would wear. He had a very young face and bright bloodshot eyes that did not look quite natural. His face still looks so young, she thought; but his body was different. Over there his body had been selfconscious in uniform and had looked inappropriate in that dress, but now the uniform was part of him and did not look strange on him in any way. He and she and Frank had laughed together about the uniform over there, calling him the blue orchid, but now there was nothing to laugh at at all and she wondered how it could ever have seemed funny that he should be wearing it.

  ‘I don't believe it. I just don't believe it's you,’ he was saying.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘What an incredible meeting. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Week-end leave.’

  ‘Do you know these people, then?’

  ‘A friend brought me. I thought I'd like some social life for a change.’

  ‘I'm very glad to see you, Ken.’

  ‘I'd have got in touch with you if I'd known your address. Now I've got to go back to-morrow. Too queer running into you this way.’

  ‘It's extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary.’ While they were speaking she Saw on his face small new lines of eye-strain but otherwise nothing altered. But the eyes themselves looked like the eyes of a man waiting to ride a difficult race. There was the same fixity and the brightness did not seem natural.

  ‘Do you remember the last time we saw each other?’ she asked him.

  ‘The morepork,’ he said, smiling.

  She did not smile. She was very startled, somehow, that he should remember and more startled that the picture should come up so clearly then. Sometimes the picture was there at night and sometimes it came when she was alone and she could understand that; but now in the noise of the party it came so much stronger and clearer than it should and there was the low house at the end of the point with water on three sides and there were the big trees with cormorants in them, and she had been happier there with Frank than with other men she had been around with but she had left it as she left every place; and there it was clear in the picture, only it startled her now. That picture was part of the woolgathering and most nights she saw it. It was very familiar but it startled her still, especially coming clear in the crowded room with the lights and the party voices, the room inside it wasn't like this room. It was plainer and emptier, no stars or candles although there were glasses, only the three people there, the troopship waiting for Ken down in the harbour, she herself waiting to travel towards the war in another ship, the morepork calling outside, the ill-omened bird of disaster. Frank laughing about the native superstition, holding his hands tight on the arms of the chair to keep from getting up and shouting to scare the bastard away. Knowing all the good well-known things that were ending. Knowing the danger and the loss and all the rest that mustn't be spoken. Knowing exactly what bad-luck symbols were worth. One could scare the morepork away but that would make everything worse. And there was Frank, gruesomely enough, joking badly about it, for whom the morepork calls; and perhaps it was calling out for all three of us really, we used to watch between the trees on the point when the ships lined up for the convoys and she could see those trees every time in the picture with the cormorants, wings held out stiff to dry, like small scarecrows. But that was another country and why was it here now? When it came at night or when she was by herself that was all right. But coming sudden and inopportune it confused her as now, she standing glass in hand at a party, talking to Ken with his unnatural eyes and he looking entirely too natural in the damned uniform. She lifted her glass and drank out of it; the punch had gone cold. Ken was still smiling. She lowered the glass again.

  The woolgathering was part of her and she was not troubled by it except when it came between her and the people she wanted; and the fear that she would finally lose the last chance. That was all that was troubling in that. Being queer didn't matter much. She didn't worry about being different and queer but what startled her so that she felt cold in the warm room was the low brown house appearing and the morepork calling outside. The picture could not really be at the party, she had heard the morepork call, and there was no morepork. Nor was there any sense in believing in evil omens. Then what was she hearing and looking at and what was disturbing, and why did she feel colder than she had felt in the cold streets because of a picture and a bird's mournful cry thousands of miles away underneath the world?

  She put her glass down on a little table amongst cactuses. It must be obvious, she was thinking. It must be obvious to everyone that she felt the way she was feeling. Ken surely would notice something. It was suddenly imperative that she escape from the eyes that were surely collecting. This was the sort of thing you got let in for by being the way she was. This was the work of the saboteur in the nerves.

  ‘I must go, Ken,’ she said, hoping it didn't sound stupidly urgent.

  He did not express surprise. He said, ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Come back to my place, then. It's not far and we'll have something to eat there. One can't talk at a party, anyway.’

  The words came without thought, and then, seeing the hesitation or whatever it was on his face, she remembered to think and said, ‘Oh, but of course you don't want to come away from the party. Good-bye.’

  But he was behind her when she said something to the host and to Mia and when she went downstairs and pulled her coat from the pile he was still there and held it up for her while she put it on. Only when the closed door shut out the noise of the party and the sinister noise of the bombers was back again deep and strong and inevitable as if it would always be filling the sky day and night, as if it were the noise of the earth's self revolving, he hesitated and seemed to hold on to the handle of the closed door so that she wondered if he would really rather have stayed. But he came with her into the street.

  ‘Shall we go by bus or by tube?’ she asked him. With distant surprise she heard him answer at once, ‘By tube’, when he couldn't have known which was better, not knowing where she lived.

  The moon was up now showing the empty bed of the street and the black bank of the opposite houses and the whitened, moon frosted roofs which might have been snowy escarpments. It was all very drear and deserted and becoming traditional and no different from the other cities unlighted and waiting amongst their ruins under the moon. In her travelling she had seen so many cities change over from darkness to light, and she remembered suddenly and completely a harbour at nightfall, the waterfront brilliant with lights, the lost sun still ghostly gold on the Kaikoura mountains across the Strait.

  ‘It's queer how it grows on you,’ he said. They were walking towards the tube station.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Having one's life up there instead of on the ground.’ She saw his face lifted up to the noise of the planes and his head tilted. ‘I don't feel at home down here. I don't belong any more. There seems to be no place where I fit in. I wanted to feel like other people again, so I thought I'd go to parties and talk to women and that would make it all right. But it doesn't work out somehow. I still feel outside. I'd like to be the same as I used to be and feel like other people again.’

  ‘I suppose you never write anything now?’

  ‘Good God, no.’

  What a fiendishly efficient machine war is, she thought, remembering him as he was and the writing, a bit immature but sensitive and direct and with much integrity. Now he would never write the things he might have written when he had learned to write well enough. It destroyed very thoroughly this war machine, this incinerator of individuality and talent and life, forging the sensitive and creative young into the steel fabric of death, turning them out by the million, the murder men, members of Murder Inc., the big firm, the global organization. Suddenly, she felt acutely angry with him.

  ‘How c
ould you let them do it to you?’ she said. ‘How can you let us all down?’

  He was not listening, walking beside her in the uniform that he wore as if he had never worn anything else. He was walking too fast for her, like a man in a hurry to get somewhere, and now he said, looking up still at the throbbing sky, ‘They've got a great night for it,’ and she said, ‘The others have too.’

  ‘I'd hate to be on the ground in a bad raid,’ he said. ‘I certainly would hate to be down here.’ He stared up at the sky.

  ‘Don't you ever think what it is you're doing up there?’ she asked him.

  They were at the tube station, and going into the light she noticed again in his eyes the nervous intent look of a rider waiting for the start of a hard race, his movements rather jerky and stiff, and she began to feel sorry because something was wrong somewhere. She looked to see what was wrong, but in place of the man with the young face who looked at her with bright bloodshot eyes there came the house in another country and the trees with cormorants in them and the morepork was calling and there was no way of seeing anything else.