by Anna Kavan
And I – I haven't even a case of books to defend me. In my defence I can call up only the few volumes for which I was able to make room when the clothes and personal necessities had been packed into my trunk. They are honourable and precious to me, these books, in proportion to their great heroism. They are like members of a suicide squad who do not hesitate to engage the enormously superior enemy, life, upon my behalf.
When I start to think of my books individually it is always the same one which takes first place in my mind: the only one of the bodyguard about whose loyalty, so to speak, I have any doubt. I have had this book that I'm thinking of for a long time, and until just lately it has never been out of my keeping. I'm not sure how it reached me originally; whether it was a present, or whether I came across it by accident on some bookseller's shelves. I only know that the author's name was unfamiliar to me. I read it first during that fabulously remote period before my troubles began. I remember the horror the story inspired in me then, and how I wondered that any normal brain could conceive and elaborate so dreadful a theme.
But then, as things went from bad to worse with me, as my circumstances became more and more unpropitious, as I wandered further and further into the maze of misfortune from which I have never succeeded in extricating myself, then my feelings towards the book underwent a change.
How can I describe the profoundly disturbing suspicion that slowly grew upon me, for which at the start there was no sort of justification? Again and again I tried to rid myself of it. But like a latent venom it dwelt obstinately in my blood, poisoning me with the idea that the story told in the book related to myself, that I myself was identified in some obscure way with the principal character. Yes, in time it crystallized into this: the terrible book revealed itself as my manual, tracing the path I was doomed to tread, step by step, to the lamentable and shameful end.
If I had come to detest the book it would have been natural. If I had destroyed it or thrown it away one could have understood that. But instead, I developed a curious attachment to it, a dependence upon it which is very hard to explain. Of course there were times when I reacted against the book. On such occasions I felt convinced that it was the origin of my bad luck and that all the disasters which have overtaken me would never have happened had I not first read about them in its pages. But then, immediately afterwards, I would be eagerly turning those pages to discóver what fresh tragic or humiliating or confusing experience was lying ahead of me.
This ambivalent attitude prevented me from coming to any hard and fast decision about the book: but whether I regarded it as an evil omen or as a talisman, it was always of the greatest significance to me and the idea of parting from it was unthinkable. I even felt uneasy if I was separated from it for more than a few hours. Particularly on those days which I expected to bring forth some new development in my case, a superstitious anxiety compelled me to carry the book everywhere I went.
That was how I came to be carrying it under my arm in the advisor's office. How I wish now that I had left it at home. But how could I possibly have guessed that I should be required to deposit some item of personal property there as a token? It came as the greatest surprise to me when, at the end of the interview, I was informed of this regulation. And why did this advisor select the book as a suitable object, drawing it from under my arm with a smile and putting it down on the top of a pile of other books on a writing desk in the corner? He might just as well have taken my scarf or one of my gloves or even my watch. I have wondered since then why I didn't make any protest. But at the time I allowed him to take the book from me without a word. I was too disconcerted to think clearly, and I was unsure of myself. I was afraid of prejudicing myself in the eyes of the man upon whose somewhat doubtful advice I was prepared to rely. Once he had taken the book in his curiously small, delicate hands it was too late to interfere.
But each time I go into the room and see it lying there, inaccessible although within easy reach, a conflict begins in my heart and I feel deeply disturbed. I start wondering whether my wisest course would not be to seize the book and carry it off, even at the cost of forgoing a support which, however dubious, is all that's left to me now.
X
My new adviser does not understand my case. There, now I have written the words I knew all the time I would have to write sooner or later. I am not surprised. Not at all. It would have been a thousand times more surprising if he, who is not even a native of our city, could have found his way through the enormously intricate labyrinth which a case that's been going on as long as mine has is bound to become. The thing which does surprise me is my own optimism. Surely I ought to recognize now that my number is up. Where do I always find enough courage for one more last hope? I am the enemy of this indestructible, pitiless hope which prolongs and intensifies all my pain. I would like to lay hold of hope and strangle it once and for all.
I have been to the adviser's office to-day. It is in a large building full of offices. To get to it from the street I had to walk up an alleyway between barbed wire and concrete-filled bins placed there to impede an attacking force. The officials who work in this building have a vast clientele. You can hardly pass through the alley without danger of being pushed into the barbed wire by one of the people who must hurry to get in or out of the place as quickly as possible. They are preoccupied individuals who frown incessantly, and the king himself would have to step briskly aside, if some abstracted client lost in anxiety took the notion of rushing past headlong to an appointment. It is noticeable that nearly all these impetuous, worried creatures are carrying brief cases of varying sizes which one can presume to contain the most urgent secret documents, the most dramatic dossiers. But I also saw commonplace people coming and going, little men with umbrellas hooked on their arms, and women with shopping bags full of parcels.
The waiting-room, when I finally got there, was crowded with people I seemed to have seen somewhere else. Yes, I already seemed to know all their faces only too ‘well. When I had taken the vacant chair that might have been left purposely for me, I saw that among them, as they sat restlessly fidgeting, there were several boys and girls, school children, and some even younger. Although I'm not particularly fond of children I couldn't help pitying the poor little things, growing up in the vile atmosphere all these rooms have, impregnated with fear and suspense. What could they be but innocent at their early age? And what sort of future could be in store for lives beginning so inauspiciously? But the children themselves paid no attention to their environment. The youngest ones slept on their mother's laps: Some of the others leaned with empty faces against the knees or shoulders of grown-up people. Some were bored and made quiet overtures to each other to pass the time. A boy in a leather jacket had climbed on the window-sill; he had got his paper-white forehead pressed to the pane, and was gazing out at the sky as if saying good-bye to it. In a far corner of the room, two big men whose shoulders carried the words ‘Heavy Rescue’ had spread themselves out in chairs, and were staring dolefully at their huge black boots projecting in front of them. The air was stale, torpid, laden with unquiet breaths.
Meanwhile a constant bustle was going on in other parts of the building: one heard footsteps hurrying about, boards creaking, doors opening and closing, voices, raised sometimes in question or argument. Only we in the waiting-room seemed shut off from participation in the activity, like forgotten castaways wrecked in some stagnant lagoon.
From time to time the door opened a little way and an indistinctlyseen person peeped in and beckoned to one of the waiting clients who immediately jumped up and rushed out as if at the point of the bayonet. A stir of excitement went through the room each time this occurred, and it would be some minutes before those who were left behind settled down again to their restless vigil. I don't know how long this went on. I have the impression that hours passed, perhaps half a day. While I waited I remembered the important man who had been my advisor in former times; his elegant town house, his major-domo, the room with wine-coloured cur
tains where he used to receive me so promptly. The fact that I now had to seek advice in such a humble and undignified fashion brought home to me painfully how my affairs had changed for the worse. It was as if the authorities, by sending me here, had set their official seal on my degradation.
At last it was my turn to receive the mysterious summons. I had decided that when it came I would walk calmly across the room without impatience or flurry: but, just like everyone else, I found myself jumping up and making a dash for the door as if my life depended on getting through it at lightning speed. It was so dark in the corridor that I could only dimly distinguish a man's figure walking ahead of me with nonchalant steps. He opened a door on the left, signalled me to enter, and followed me in. Apparently it was the advisor himself who had come for me. He was a young, rather plump man, a foreigner obviously, with an impeccably-tied bow tie, and there was about him that finical, even dainty air which stout people sometimes have. It was the tie in particular which gave this effect, as if a neat, blue-spotted butterfly had alighted under his chin.
He stood fingering the ends of the bow delicately for a moment, smiling at me in a way that was both absent-minded and polite, before he invited me to sit down. I took the chair that he indicated and began to explain my case. The room was quite small and square, with green walls. Outside the window, almost touching the glass, was a large tree, still covered, in spite of the lateness of the season, with trembling green leaves. As the leaves stirred, watery shadows wavered over the ceiling and walls, so that one had the impression of being enclosed in a tank.
I felt singularly uncomfortable. My case was difficult to describe. I did not know where to start, or which particulars to relate, which to omit, since it was clearly impossible to mention every detail of the enormously protracted and complex business.
The young foreigner sat listening to me without making a single note. His manner was perfectly correct, but I somehow had the impression that he was not fully attentive. I wondered how much he understood of what I was saying: it was clear to me from the few words he had spoken that his grasp of the language was far from perfect. And why did he not write down at least some of the salient points of my statement? He surely didn't propose to rely purely on memory in such a complicated affair? Now and then he fingered the wings of his tie and smiled absently; but whether at me or at his own thoughts there was no way of knowing.
The situation suddenly appeared heartbreaking, futile, and I felt on the verge of tears. What was I doing here in this tank-like room, relating my private and piercing griefs to a smiling stranger who spoke in a different tongue? I thought I should stand up and go away, but I heard myself talking in agitation, begging him to realize the extreme gravity of my predicament and to give it more serious consideration, seeing that he was my last available source of assistance.
The young advisor smiled at me politely and made some vague fluttering movements with his small hands, at the same time saying a few words to the effect that my case was not really so exceptional as I thought; that it was, in fact, quite a common one. I protested that he must be mistaken, perhaps had not understood me completely. He smiled again, and repeated those indeterminate motions which possibly were intended to be reassuring but which only conveyed to me a distrustful sense of misapprehension. Then he glanced at his watch in a way that was meant to signify the end of the interview, and instructed me to come back again in two or three days.
I don't remember how I got out of the building: I've no recollection of passing between the coils of barbed wire in the alley. The sun was setting and I was in a residential part of the city that was strange to me; I walked up long, hilly, deserted streets between large houses, most of which seemed to be uninhabited. Dry autumnal weeds grew tall in the gardens, and the black window holes gaped with jagged fringes like mirror fragments in which the last rays of the sun stared at themselves bitterly. Then I passed a stranger who glanced coldly at me, and other strangers passed by with cold faces, and still other strangers. Armoured vehicles, eccentrically coloured, stood in an endless chain at the roadside, painted with cabalistic signs. But what these symbols meant I had no idea-. I had no idea if there were a place anywhere to which I could go to escape from the strangeness, or what I could do to bear being a stranger in our strange city, or whether I should ever visit that stranger who was my advisor again.
By the same author
Asylum Piece
A Charmed Circle
Guilty
Ice
Mercury
The Parson
A Scarcity of Love
Sleep Has His House
A Stranger Still
Who Are You?
PETER OWEN PUBLISHERS
81 Ridge Road, London N8 9NP
Peter Owen books are distributed in the USA and Canada by Independent Publishers Group/Trafalgar Square 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, IL 60610, USA
© Anna Kavan 1945
© Rhys Davies and R.B. Marriott 1978
Foreword © Victoria Walker 2013
First published in Great Britain 1945
First Peter Owen Modern Classic edition 2013
This ebook edition 2013
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publishers.
PAPERBACK ISBN 978-0-7206-1493-0
EPUB ISBN 978-0-7206-1530-2
KINDLE ISBN 978-0-7206-1531-9
PDF ISBN 978-0-7206-1532-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Also published by Peter Owen
ICE
Anna Kavan
978-0-7206-1268-4 • 158 pp • £9.95 / / EPUB 978-0-7206-1415-2
KINDLE 978-0-7206-1416-9 / PDF 978-0-7206-1417-6
Peter Owen Modern Classic
‘A classic, a vision of unremitting intensity which combines some remarkable imaginative writing with what amounts to a love-song to the end of the world. Not a word is wasted, not an image is out of place.’
– Times Literary Supplement
‘One can only admire the strength and courage of this visionary.’ – The Times
‘Few contemporary novelists could match the intensity of her vision.’ – J.G. Ballard
In this haunting and surreal novel, the narrator and a man known as ‘the warden’ search for an elusive girl in a frozen, seemingly post-nuclear, apocalyptic landscape. The country has been invaded and is being governed by a secret organization. There is destruction everywhere; great walls of ice overrun the world. Together with the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory quest for this strange and fragile creature with albino hair. Acclaimed by Brian Aldiss on its publication in 1967 as the best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary and innovative novel has subsequently been recognized as a major work of literature in any genre.
‘There is nothing else like it … This Ice is not psychological ice or metaphysical ice; here the loneliness of childhood has been magicked into a physical reality as hallucinatory as the Ancient Mariner's.’ – Doris Lessing
Also published by Peter Owen
GUILTY
Anna Kavan
PB 978-0-7206-1268-4 • 158 pp • £9.95 / EPUB 978-0-7206-1441-1
KINDLE 978-0-7206-1442-8 / PDF 978-0-7206-1443-5
‘Thrillingly unclassifiable’ – Guardian
‘A week after finishing Guilty, I'm still haunted. Kavan's art is breathtaking – why is there no South Bank Show on this genius drug-fiend?’
– Duncan Fallowell, Financial Times
Not published until forty years after Anna Kavan's death, Guilty, narrated by Mark, is set in an unspecified but eerily familiar time and landscape. He begins the novel as a young boy whose father has just returned from war. In spite of being garlanded as a hero, Mark's father declares himself a pacifist and is immediately reviled in a country still suffering from the divisions of conflict. When his father is forced into exile Mark
meets Mr Spector, a shady figure who from then on is a dominant force in Mark's life, seeing him through his schooling, employment and even finding him accommodation. When Mark tries to break away from Mr Spector to pursue an engagement with the beautiful but docile Carla his life begins to unravel. Thwarted at every turn by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy he begins to fall prey to the machinations and insecurities of his guilt-ridden mind. Drawing on many of Kavan's familiar themes, Guilty will be welcomed by those who already know Kavan's work and a revelation to those who don't.