Anna Kavan: Asylum Piece

‘You must set out with the fixed intention of doing your duty towards us,’ my Patron is saying. ‘You must try your hardest to wipe out past bad impressions. Above all you must demonstrate your gratitude towards your Patroness, earn her forgiveness, and prove yourself worthy of her generosity.’

‘And where am I to find a little warmth in all this?’ I cry out desperately. What an incongruous sound the words have between these serene walls and how the fastidious flowers seem to toss their heads in disdain.

I know now that I have thrown away my last chance. There is no object in waiting a moment longer, so I get up and fly from the room. And at once the lift is swooping away with me, carrying me down to the cold, foggy streets where I belong.

Somewhere in the world I have an implacable enemy although I do not know his name. I do not know what he looks like, either. In fact, if he were to walk into the room at this moment, while I am writing, I shouldn’t be any the wiser. For a long time I believed that some instinct would warn me if we ever came face to face: but now I no longer think this is so. Perhaps he is a stranger to me; but much more probably he is someone whom I know quite well — perhaps someone I see every day. For if he is not a person in my immediate environment, how does he come to possess such detailed information about my movements? It seems quite impossible for me to make any decision — even concerning such a trifling matter as visiting a friend for the evening — without my enemy knowing about it and taking steps to ensure my discomfiture. And, of course, as regards more important issues, he is just as well informed.

The fact that I know absolutely nothing about him makes life intolerable, for I am obliged to look upon everybody with equal suspicion. There is literally not a soul whom I can trust.

As the days go past I find that I am becoming more and more preoccupied with this wretched problem; indeed, it has become an obsession with me. Whenever I speak to anyone I catch myself scrutinizing him with secret attention, searching for some sign that would betray the traitor who is determined to ruin me. I cannot concentrate on my work because I am always debating in my mind the question of my enemy’s identity and the cause of his hate. What act of mine can possibly have given rise to such a relentless persecution? I go over and over my past life without finding any clue. But perhaps the situation has arisen through no fault of my own but merely on account of some fortuitous circumstances that I know nothing about. Perhaps I am the victim of some mysterious political, religious or financial machination — some vast and shadowy plot, whose ramifications are so obscure as to appear to the uninitiated to be quite outside reason, requiring, for instance, something as apparently senseless as the destruction of everybody with red hair or with a mole on his left leg.

Because of this persecution my private life is already practically in ruins. My friends and family are alienated, my creative work is at a standstill, my manner has become nervous, gloomy and irritable, I am unsure of myself, even my voice has grown hesitating and indistinct.

You would think that my enemy might take pity on me now; that, seeing the miserable plight to which he has reduced me, he would be content with his vengeance and leave me in peace. But no, I know perfectly well that he will never relent. He will never be satisfied until he has destroyed me utterly. It is the beginning of the end now; for during the last few weeks I have received almost certain indications that he is starting to lodge false accusations against me in official quarters. The time can’t be far off when I shall be taken away. It will be at night, probably, that they will come for me. There will be no revolvers, no handcuffs; everything will be quiet and orderly with two or three men in uniform, or white jackets, and one of them will carry a hypodermic syringe. That is how it will be with me. I know that I’m doomed and I’m not going to struggle against my fate. I am only writing this down so that when you do not see me any more you will know that my enemy has finally triumphed.

When one has lived for seven years in the same house some strange things are apt to take place. Of course, I am not speaking now about people who have lived all their lives in one house which they have perhaps inherited from their fathers and grandfathers or even from more remote ancestors: I imagine that an entirely different system of laws must apply to them. But when somebody like myself, a person who is by nature a wanderer, through a chain of accidental circumstances becomes attached to a certain building, the consequences may be very surprising.

I belong to a family of rolling stones. We have never been landowners; in fact, we have always avoided the accumulation of possessions which tend to restrict one’s free movement about the world. So the prospect of my becoming a householder gave rise to a good deal of talk among us.

My relatives all advised me to sell the property. How I wish now that I had followed their advice! But at the time I was unaccountably averse to parting with the place. I remember that my uncle Lucius, who hates slow travelling, actually undertook a long, complicated cross-country journey — and in bitter Christmas weather, too — to come and discuss the matter with me. And I remember that I countered his reasonable proposals with arguments in which I only partially believed even then, saying that the house was too small to become burdensome and that if I sold it and invested the proceeds the income would be only negligible.

What made me so obstinate? That’s the question I’ve asked myself hundreds of times without finding any answer. Was it a sort of masochism, a secret desire for self-punishment, that held me to a line of conduct which, right from the beginning, I more than half-consciously felt could only end in disaster?

It’s not as though the place has any special attractions. It is a house of no definite architectural design, half old, half new. The lines of the new part are straightforward and easily read like a sum in simple arithmetic; the old part is complicated and oblique, full of treacherous angles, with a roof that sags like the back of a worn-out horse and is blotched with scabrous patches of lichen. Paradoxically, the old part has only been added recently. When I first came to live here it was an entirely new house — that is to say, it had certainly not been standing for more than ten or fifteen years. Now, at least half of it must have been built many centuries ago. It is the old part which has grown up during my occupation that I fear and distrust.

Lying peacefully curled up on a sunny day, the new house looks like a harmless grey animal that would eat out of your hand; at night the old house opens its stony, inward-turning eyes and watches me with a hostility that can scarcely be borne. The old walls drape themselves with transparent curtains of hate. Like a beast of prey the house lies in ambush for me, the victim it has already swallowed, the intruder within its ancient structure of stone.

Coiling itself round me it knows I cannot escape. Imprisoned in its very fabric, I am like a small worm, a parasite, which the host harbours not altogether unwillingly. The time has not yet come to eject me. A few more months or years the house will nourish me in its frozen bowels before it spews me like an owl’s pellet into the arches of infinite space through which my husk of skin and crushed bones will fall for ever and ever.

Sometimes I almost burst out laughing when, in the level daylight, it turns its new face to me. Why this childish clinging to a pretence which misleads no one? Isn’t it enough that the house has wound me with hateful entrails — that it will soon cast me out like vomit, like dung — but that it must even try to mock me with its deception as well?