I Am Lazarus (Peter Owen Modern Classic)

by Anna Kavan

  He went into the ward and lay down on his bed and closed his eyes against the drops of sweat which trickled into the ends of his eyes. Then for a time there was nothing but the soreness of breath struggling against the stone.

  This was what he had known a long while, ever since the truck had been blown thirty feet down into the ravine and he had seen the falling stone and felt it strike, felt it smash bone, tearing through muscle, sinew and vein to lodge itself immovably in his breast. Ever since then the stone had been there inside him, and at first it had seemed a small stone, just a dead spot, a sort of numbness under the breastbone. He had told the M.O. about it and the M.O. had laughed, saying there was no stone or possibility of a stone, and after that he had not spoken of it again; never once. But from the start he had been very uneasy, oppressed by the stone and by the heaviness that could come from it suddenly to drive away laughter and talk. He had tried not to think of the stone, but it had grown heavier and heavier until he could not think of anything else, until it crushed out everything else, and he could only carry it by making a very great effort. That was not so bad really, because with the weight of the stone crushing him he was nothing and that was not painful or frightening – it was just a waiting and that was nothing as well. But sometimes, perhaps at the moment of going to sleep, the dead weight lifted a little and then there were all the uncovered faces, the stone and the digging, and the old man would come back.

  And so he lay very still on the bed, waiting for the deadness to overlay him, lying there in the knowledge that if the dead weight of the stone lifted to let him breathe the old man would come.

  Strange how it was always this one who came and never one of the others.

  The stone weight was lifting now and Kling, who had dozed a little while after his breath had stopped struggling, woke suddenly, frightened by the return of the bloody-faced man lying in brown leaves with hairs growing out of his nostrils and a torn shirt fluttering.

  That was his father who had lain dead in the room beside the Blue Lake. No, not that man. When he thought of his home he couldn't see any faces, only the jagged line of the mountains like broken eggshell against the sky; and the two lakes, the Blue Lake and the lake shaped like a harp. That, and sometimes the inn with the acid wine of the district greenish in thick glasses, the swarming trout in the small tank on the wall, crowded sleek fish bodies slithering past the glass. But no faces ever. The stone blocked out all the home faces.

  When he thought of the war it was always the digging he thought of because, seeing him so strong and used to work with a spade, they had put him on that job from the beginning; and then there were faces, wrecked or fearful or quiet or obscene faces, far too many of them, how he had laboured and toiled till his saliva ran sour, desperate to hide the faces away from the brutal light.

  How many faces had he covered with earth and stones? There surely were thousands; and always thousands more waiting: and he all the time digging demented, always the compulsive urge in him like a frenzy, to hide the ruined faces away. And sometimes he remembered that officer in charge of the burying party, the one who joked and sang all the time; he must have been a bit cracked really, boozed or something, but they had dug and shovelled till their hands were raw blistered and hardly noticed the pain because of his Hey! Hi! Ho! and the jolly loud voice that he had.

  There had been no singing that afternoon in the gully where the corpses, boys and old men among them, sprawled in the withered oak leaves between the rocks. Only haste then and the bitter taste in the mouth and the aching lungs, hacking the stony ground that was hard like iron to the weak bite of the spade, and the sky grey and muggy and flat and quiet. In the end someone had shouted and the others all started running back to the truck and he had run too and just then he had seen the old man lying flat on his back with blood congealing all down one side of his shattered face and the dry leaves gummed and blackening in the blood.

  Kling was looking now at this object that the stone had rolled aside to reveal. There was no stone weighting him any more as he watched the object, feeling the bed shake under him as he shook and the muscles twitching in his forearms and thighs.

  Then watching the object, while his heart pounded, he saw the hairs sprouting in his father's nostrils as he lay dead on the wooden bed that was like a wagon without wheels, he saw a movement detach itself from this man in the gully, or perhaps it was the tom shirt which flapped in the wind, only there was no wind, and he did not stop to investigate but, knowing only the obsessional urge to hide at all costs that which ought not to be exposed to the level light, hoisted his spade and shoved and battered and fought the topheavy rock until he heard a grinding crash and knew the torn face bashed out of sight, shapeless-smashed and hidden under the stone: and was it the same stone that burst his own chest and sank its black, dead heaviness in his heart?

  The weight fell again now so that there was no more pain or fright and the bed did not shake; there was only the waiting that was nothingness really, and the men in blue talking and moving about the ward.

  That was all that he knew, sweat slowly drying as he lay on the bed, and the old man buried mercifully by the stone. The others took no notice of Kling nor he of them and he heard their talk and did not know that he heard until a woman's voice cut through sharp, ‘Williams, and the rest of you, why are you hanging about in the ward?’ He turned his head then to the nurse who had just come in; she was speaking to him too: ‘Kling, you're to go to Dr. Pope after tea. You'd better get up and make yourself decent’, and he saw her pale, cold eyes linger on him as she went out of the door.

  ‘Get up and make yourself decent,’ the man called Williams said. ‘That's a way to talk to a fellow who's sick.’

  Kling said nothing but looked up at him, waiting.

  ‘To hell with them,’ Williams said. ‘To hell with the whole setup. Bloody racket to get sick men back into the army. Cannon fodder, that's all they care about. Taking advantage of poor mugs like us. Pep talks. Pills to pep you up. Dope to make you talk. Putting chaps to sleep and giving them electric shocks and Christ knows what. Lot of bloody guinea pigs, that's what we are. Bloody, isn't it?’

  Kling was staring at him with blank eyes.

  ‘Look at Kling here,’ Williams said. ‘Any fool can see he's as sick as hell. Why can't they leave him in peace? Why should he go back into their bloody army? This isn't his country anyway. Why should he fight for it?’

  From the far reaches of his non-being Kling looked at the faces round him. They were all looking at him but they had no meaning. Williams had no meaning any more than the others. But he heard Williams go on.

  ‘Damned gestapo methods. Spying and snooping around listening to talk. Bitches of nurses. Why the hell do we stand for it?’

  A bell was ringing and the patients started to move out of the ward. Kling, staring up, saw the shapes of their meaningless faces receding from him. He looked at Williams who was still there and Williams looked back at him, smiling, and said, ‘Coming to tea, chum?’ And in the words Kling half recognized something forgotten and long-lost, and some corresponding thing in him which had died long ago almost revived itself; but the stone was too heavy for that resurrection, and he could not know that what he wanted to do was to smile.

  ‘So long, then, if you're stopping here,’ Williams said. He pulled a packet of Weights out of his pocket and put a cigarette on the bed beside Kling's hand which did not move. ‘Don't let that bastard of a doctor put anything over on you’, Kling heard Williams, walking towards the door, call back to him as he went.

  Kling did not smoke the cigarette, or pick it up even; but after a time rose, and with those stiff motions which seemed to be rehearsing some exercise not well remembered, washed, dressed himself in shirt and blue trousers, combed his thick hair, and went along corridors to the door upon which was fastened the doctor's name.

  There was a bench outside the door, and he sat down on it, waiting. The passage was dark because the windows had been coated with bla
ck paint for the blackout. Nothing moved in the long, dark, silent passage at the end of which Kling sat alone on the bench. He sat there bending forward, his hands clasped between his knees, his red tie dangling, his eyes fixed on the ground. He did not wonder what would happen behind the door. He waited, without speculation or awareness of waiting. It was all the same to him, outside or here or in the ward, he did not notice, it made no difference to his waiting.

  A nurse opened the door and called him and he got up and stepped forward, and looking past her along the wall of the corridor thought, How many stones there are in this place; so many faces and stones: and lost the thought before it meant anything and went into the room.

  ‘I want you to lie on the couch.’ Dr. Pope told him. ‘We're going to give you a shot of something that will make you feel a bit sleepy. Quite a pleasant feeling. It won't hurt at all.’

  Obedient, null, with that unnatural stiffness, Kling laid himself down.

  Lying on the high couch he looked at the exuberant ceiling without surprise. The flowers and the crowding cherubic faces did not seem any more strange to him than anything else. The ceiling did not concern him any more than the doctor concerned him. Nothing concerned him except the heaviness in his breast. He waited, looking at the doctor as if he had never seen him before, the nurse busy with swab and spirit and tourniquet, and he felt far off on his arm the tourniquet tightening, the bursting pressure of flesh against tightening fabric, and then the small sharp sting as the needle entered the vein.

  ‘Just try to relax,’ the doctor said, watching, while the fluid in the hypodermic went down, the blank waiting face with wide-open extremely dilated eyes.

  He smiled his professional smile of encouragement, and looked from the face to the chest and the massive shoulders bulked rigid under the white shirt that they stretched tight, at the clenched strong hands, the rough blue cloth strained on the tensed thighs, the stiffly upthrust boots not neatly laced, and back to the blank face again. He noticed on the face how the deep tan of the outdoor years was starting to turn yellowish as it slowly faded inside hospital walls.

  ‘Well, how do you feel now?’ he asked, smiling, the man who stared up at him without answering.

  ‘I want you to talk, Kling,’ he said. ‘I want you to tell me what's worrying you.’

  Kling, his patient, looked away from him and up at the ceiling.

  ‘What is it you've got on your mind?’ asked the doctor.

  Kling stared upwards without speaking and now his limbs started twitching a little.

  ‘You'll feel better after you've talked,’ Dr. Pope said.

  The nurse finished the long injection and withdrew the syringe adroitly. A single drop of blood oozed from the pierced vein and she dabbed a shred of cotton wool on to it and silently carried her paraphernalia into the background and stood watching.

  ‘You've got to tell me what's making you miserable,’ the doctor said, speaking loud. He bent down and put his hand on Kling's shoulder and said loudly and very distinctly, close to his ear, ‘You are very miserable, aren't you?’

  Kling looked at him with his wide, black, lost animal's eyes and felt the hand on his shoulder. His shoulder twitched and something inside him seemed to be loosening, he felt sick in his stomach, and a sleepy strangeness was coming up at him out of nowhere, turning him tired, or sick.

  ‘Why are you miserable?’ he heard the question. ‘Something happened to you, didn't it? Something you can't forget. What was that thing?’

  Kling saw the doctor standing far too close, bending down almost on top of him. The hand that had hold of his shoulder gripped hard like a trap, the distorted face looked monstrous, foreshortened and suspended beneath painted faces, the eyes glaring, the threat of the mouth opening and shutting. Kling groaned, turning his head from one side to the other to escape from the eyes, but the eyes would not let him go. He felt the strangeness of sleep or sickness or death moving up on him, and then something gave way in his chest, the stone shifted, and sleep came forward to the foot of the couch, and he groaned again, louder, clutching his chest, crumpling the shirt and the red tie over his breastbone.

  ‘Was it something bad that was done to you?’ he heard the doctor's voice shout in his ear.

  He felt himself turning and twisting on the hard bed, twisting away from the eyes and the voice and the gripping hand that was shaking him now. He shut his eyes to escape, but a salt prick of tears or sweat forced them open, he did not know where he was or what was happening to him, and he was afraid. He was very frightened with the strange sleep so near him, he wanted to call for help, it was hard for him to keep silent. But somewhere in the midst of fear existed the thought, They've taken everything; let them not take my silence. And the queer thing was that Williams was somehow a part of this, his smile, the cigarette, and what he had spoken.

  ‘Was it something bad that you did?’ Kling heard.

  He did not feel the hand that was shaking his shoulder. He only felt his face wet, and on the other side of sleep a voice kept on moaning while another voice shouted. But he could not listen because, just then, the stone moved quite away from his breast and sleep came up and laid its languid head on his breast in place of the stone.

  He tried to look at the strange sleep, to know it, but it had no form, it simply rested sluggishly on him, like gas, and all he could see above was a cloud of faces, the entire earth was no graveyard great enough for so many, nor was there room to remember a smile or a cigarette or a voice any more.

  The old man was there and had been for some time, not sprawled in leaves now but standing, bent forward, listening; and Kling knew that this time something must pass between them, there was something which must be said by him, in extenuation, or in entreaty, to which the old man must reply: though what it was that had to be said, or what words would be found to express it, did not appear yet.

  The old man bent over him and blood dripped on to his face and he could not move because of what lay on his breast, and when the old man saw he could not move he bent lower still and Kling could see the tufts of bristly hairs in his father's nostrils. He knew he would have to speak soon, and, staring wildly, with the old man's face almost on his, he could see the side of the face that was only a bloodied hole and he heard a sudden frantic gasp and gush of words in his own language and that was all he heard because at that moment sleep reached up and covered over his face.

  Dr. Pope and the nurse had both seen that Kling was going to start talking. The doctor had seen it coming for about half a minute and waited intently. The nurse looked expectant. When the first sounds came both of them had moved forward at once and the doctor had bent lower over his patient but now they stepped back from the couch.

  ‘I was afraid that might happen,’ Dr. Pope said in his impatient voice. ‘Damned annoying. I suppose there's no one in the place who could translate?’

  ‘I'm afraid not,’ the nurse said.

  ‘Exasperating,’ the doctor said. ‘So we shan't get anything out of him after all.’

  ‘I'm afraid not,’ the nurse said again.

  ‘Most frustrating and disappointing,’ said Dr. Pope. ‘Oh, well, it's no good trying to work on him now.’

  THE HEAVENLY ADVERSARY

  … ‘in a culture which is completely disordered, prince and servant are enemies, old age and youth kill eachother, father and son bear cold hearts, brothers accuse eachother, the most intimate friends work against eachother, man and wife deceive eachother, … day after day the danger increases … the bonds of society are loosened … the spirit becomes bestial … the greed for gain grows … duty and common sense arc forgotten. …

  Clouds appear in the shape of dogs, horses, white swans and columns of carriages … Or they have the shape of a man in a blue garment and red head who does not move. His name is: the Heavenly Adversary … or they have the shape of a host of horses fighting: those are called the Slaying Horses … snakes crawl through the town from West to East … horses and cattle begin to talk, do
gs and pigs mate, wolves come into the city. Men fall from the sky … When such signs appear in the land and its master does not better his ways in his fear, God shall send misfortune, sorrow and plague … all kinds of death, annihilation, earthquake, destruction and grief shall arrive … all this is caused by disorder in the state. …’

  LIE BU WE – about 300 B.C.

  WHY did he leave me, I wonder? It seems almost incredible that less than a week has passed – only a few days, in fact – since I was preparing an evening meal for us both in this very room. How happy we were that evening. Or perhaps I ought to say, How happy I was: for events have turned out so differently from my expectations that I feel more than ever astray in the world, as though all my life I had been working along lines that had no relation at all to reality. When appearances prove so deceptive, one's own sensations are all that one really has to rely on; and I can say, at least, without any doubt, that I was extremely happy that evening.

  It was, perhaps, the second or third meal we had eaten together in the little house; the house to which I had moved on purpose to be in the same district of the city as this auburn stranger who had dropped into my life as if from the clouds, bringing with him a happiness I had not expected to feel again.

  It seemed such a gay little house then, with its yellow shutters, its steep ladder-like flight of stairs, and its small, oddly-shaped rooms, each one painted a different colour. There was the living room all pale green like the springtime trees beneath which we walked every day after my work was finished; the bedroom coloured like almond blossom; the kitchen blue and white like one of those plates on which one traced as a child endless magic journeys.