Anna Kavan - Asylum Piece

Now I am almost on the point of falling asleep. My body feels limp, my thoughts start to run together. My thoughts have become strands of weed, of no special colour, slowly undulating in colourless water.

My left hand twitches and again I am wide awake. It is the striking of the church clock that has called me back to my jailer’s presence. Did I count five strokes or four? I am too tired to be certain. In any case, the night will be over soon. The iron band on my head has tightened and slipped down so that it presses against my eyeballs. And yet the pain does not seem so much to come from this cruel pressure as to emanate from somewhere inside my skull, from the brain cortex: it is the brain itself which is aching.

All at once I feel desperate, outraged. Why am I alone doomed to spend nights of torment, with an unseen jailer, when all the rest of the world sleeps peacefully? By what laws have I been tried and condemned, without my knowledge, and to such a heavy sentence, too, when I do not even know of what or by whom I have been indicted? A wild impulse comes to me to protest, to demand a hearing, to refuse to submit any longer to such injustice.

But to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one’s innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there’s no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame.

Last summer, or perhaps it was only the other day, — I find it so difficult to keep count of time now — I had a very disagreeable experience.

The day was ill-omened from the beginning; one of those unlucky days when every little detail seems to go wrong and one finds oneself engaged in a perpetual and infuriating strife with inanimate objects. How truly fiendish the sub-human world can be on these occasions! How every atom, every cell, every molecule, seems to be leagued in a maddening conspiracy against the unfortunate being who has incurred its obscure displeasure! This time, to make matters worse, the weather itself had decided to join in the fray. The sky was covered with a dull grey lid of cloud, the mountains had turned sour prussian blue, swarms of mosquitoes infested the shores of the lake. It was one of those sunless summer days that are infinitely more depressing than the bleakest winter weather; days when the whole atmosphere feels stale, and the world seems like a dustbin full of old battered tins and fish scales and decayed cabbage stalks.

Of course, I was behindhand with everything all day long. I had to race through my changing for the game of tennis I had arranged to play in the afternoon, and as it was I was about ten minutes late. The other players had arrived and were having some practice shots as they waited for me. I was annoyed to see that they had chosen the middle court which is the one I like least of the three available for our use. When I asked why they had not taken the upper one, which is far the best, they replied that it had already been reserved for some official people. Then I suggested going to the lower court; but they grumbled and said that it was damp on account of the over-hanging trees. As there was no sun, I could not advance the principal objection to the middle court, which is that it lies the wrong way for the afternoon light. There was nothing for it but to begin playing.

The next irritating occurrence was that instead of keeping to my usual partner, David Post, it was for some reason decided that I should play with a man named Muller whom I hardly knew and who turned out to be a very inferior player. He was a bad loser as well, for as soon as it became clear that our opponents were too strong for us, he lost all interest in the game and behaved in a thoroughly unsporting manner. He was continually nodding and smiling to the people who stopped to watch us, paying far more attention to the onlookers than to the game. At other times, while the rest of us were collecting the balls or I was receiving the service, he would move away and stare at the main road which runs near, watching the cars as if he expected the arrival of someone he knew. In the end it became almost impossible to keep him on the court at all; he was always wandering off and having to be recalled by our indignant shouts. It seemed futile to continue the game in these circumstances, and at the end of the first set we abandoned play by mutual consent.

You can imagine that I was not in a particularly good mood when I got back to my room. Besides being in a state of nervous irritation I was hot and tired, and my chief object was to have a bath and change into fresh clothes as soon as possible. So I was not at all pleased to find a complete stranger waiting for me to whom I should have to attend before I did anything else.

She was a young woman of about my own age, quite attractive in a rather hard way, and neatly dressed in a tan linen suit, white shoes, and a hat with a little feather. She spoke well, but with a slight accent that I couldn’t quite place: afterwards I came to the conclusion that she was a colonial of some sort.

I invited her to sit down as politely as I could and asked what I could do for her. She refused the chair, and, instead of giving a straightforward answer, spoke evasively, touching the racquet which I still held in my hand, and making some inquiry about the strings. It seemed quite preposterous to me in the state I was in then to find myself involved with an unknown woman in an aimless discussion of the merits of different makes of racquets, and I’m afraid I closed the subject rather abruptly and asked her point-blank to state her business.

But then she looked at me in such a peculiar way, saying in quite a different voice, ‘You know, I’m really sorry I have to give you this’, and I saw that she was holding out a box towards me, just an ordinary small, round, black pill box that might have come from any chemist. And all at once I felt frightened and wished we could return to the conversation about tennis racquets. But there was no going back.

I’m not sure now whether she told me in so many words or whether I simply deduced that the judgement which I had awaited so long had at last been passed upon me and that this was the end. I remember — of all things! — feeling a little aggrieved because the sentence was conveyed to me in such a casual, unostentatious way, almost as if it were a commonplace event. I opened the box and saw the four white pellets inside.

‘Now?’ I asked. And I found that I was looking at my visitor with altered eyes, seeing her as an official messenger whose words had acquired a fatal portentousness.

She nodded without speaking. There was a pause. ‘The sooner the better,’ she said. I could feel the perspiration, still damp on me from the game, turning cold as ice.

‘But at least I must have a bath first!’ I cried out in a frantic way, clutching the clammy neck of my tennis shirt. ‘I can’t stay like this — it’s indecent — undignified!’

She told me that would be allowed as a special concession.

Into the bathroom I went like a doomed person, and turned on the taps. I don’t remember anything about the bath; I suppose I must have washed and dried myself mechanically and put on my mauve silk dressing gown with the blue sash. Perhaps I even combed my hair and powdered my face. All I remember is the little black box confronting me all the time from the shelf over the basin where I had put it down.

At last I brought myself to the point of opening it and holding the four pills on the palm of my hand; I lifted them to my mouth. And then the most ridiculous contretemps occurred — there was no drinking glass in the bathroom. It must have got broken: or else the maid must have taken it away and forgotten to bring it back. What was I to do? I couldn’t swallow even four such small pellets without a drink, and I couldn’t endure any further delay. In despair I filled the soapdish with water and swallowed them down somehow. I hadn’t even waited to wash out the slimy layer of soap at the bottom and the taste nearly made me sick. For several minutes I stood retching and choking and clinging to the edge of the basin. Then I sat down on the stool. I waited with my heart beating as violently as a hammer in my throat. I waited; and nothing happened; absolutely nothing whatever. I didn’t even feel drowsy or faint.