Anna Kavan: Asylum Piece

But no one around me even knows what is going on. Only the dog seems to sense that all is not well with me. And when, just now, unable to bear my sufferings any longer in silence, I whispered to him, ‘Oh, Tige, I’ll soon have to leave you — this dreadful thing is really going to happen to me — nothing will save me now,’ I saw a dimness like tears in his lustrous brown eyes.

‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit?

Whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend into heaven thou art there.

If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning, even there thy hand shall lead me.’

I can’t think properly these days, I find it difficult to remember, but I suppose those words were written about Jehovah, though they apply just as well to my enemy — if that is what I should call him.

‘If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.’ That particular phrase rings in my brain with a horrid aptness: for certainly I have made my bed in hell and certainly he is here with me. He is near all the time although I do not see him. Only sometimes, very early in the morning before it has got light, I seem to catch a glimpse of a half familiar face peering in at the window; but it is always snatched away so quickly that I have no time to recognize it. And just once, one evening, the door of my room was suddenly opened a little way and somebody glanced in through the crack, glanced in, and then passed hurriedly out of sight down the corridor. Perhaps that was he.

Why does he keep his eye on me like this now that he has accomplished his purpose and brought about my destruction? It can’t be to make sure that I don’t escape; oh, no, there’s no possibility of that, he need not have the slightest fear. Is it just to gloat over my ruin? But no, I don’t think that’s the reason, either, for if that were so he would come more often and at times more humiliating to me when I am in the deepest despair.

Somehow I have the impression from those vague glimpses I have caught of his face that it wears a look that is not vindictive, but kindred, almost as though he were related closely to me by some similarity of brain or blood. And of late the idea has come to me — fantastic enough, I admit — that possibly after all he is not my personal enemy, but a sort of projection of myself, an identification of myself with the cruelty and destructiveness of the world. On a planet where there is so much natural conflict may there not very well exist in certain individuals an overwhelming affinity with frustration and death? And may this not result in an actual materialization, a sort of eidolon moving about the world?

I have thought a lot about such matters of late, sitting here and looking out of the window. For, strangely enough, there are windows without bars in this place and doors which are not even locked. Apparently there is nothing to prevent me from walking out whenever I feel inclined. Yet though there is no visible barrier I know only too well that I am surrounded by unseen and impassable walls which tower into the highest domes of the zenith and sink many miles below the surface of the earth.

So it has come upon me, the doom too long awaited, the end without end, the bannerless triumph of the enemy who, after all, appears to be close as a brother. Already it seems to me that I have spent a lifetime in this narrow room whose walls will continue to regard me with secrecy through innumerable lifetimes to come. Is it life, then, or death, stretching like an uncoloured stream behind and in front of me? There is no love here, nor hate, nor any point where feeling accumulates. In this nameless place nothing appears animate, nothing is close, nothing is real; I am pursued by the remembered scent of dust sprinkled with summer rain.

Outside my window there is a garden where nobody ever walks: a garden without seasons, for the trees are all evergreens. At certain times of the day I can hear the clatter of footsteps on the concrete covered ways which intersect the lawns, but the garden is always deserted, set for the casual appreciation of strangers, or else for the remote and solitary contemplation of eyes defeated like mine. In this impersonal garden, all neatness and vacancy, there is no arbour where friends could linger, but only concrete paths along which people walk hurriedly, inattentive to the singing of birds.