Anna Kavan - Let Me Alone

Matthew came into the room. She was unaware. She was watching the void of roaring darkness. He saw her grave, jewel-hard face turned to the night, her slim body straight against the dark window. Her face was so abstracted and cold, the expression of her face seemed sinister, apart from humanity. The sound of the wind was like voices which she seemed to understand, like voices calling to her. She looked intent.

Matthew stood motionless. He was half afraid. He half wanted to go away from her. But he could not. He could not go away. A sort of hysteria was goading him, goading him towards her desperately. His face was blank; there was darkness in his heart.

At last he said:

‘Why haven’t you started to undress?’

She looked round as if a shadow had spoken. Matthew stood stiff, just inside the doorway.

She looked at him. But she hardly seemed to see him. She took no heed of him. He was affronted; his heart black and angry.

‘Are you waiting for me to help you?’ he asked, with a vicious leer. And a sharp pain leapt within her. She knew what was coming — she would have to fight him. He should not touch her.

‘I was watching the storm,’ she said coldly.

Matthew watched her with a queer smile on his face. But it was a smile of enmity. He came a little nearer.

‘Let me help you,’ he said. ‘Let me take off your dress.’ And he smiled suggestively, with suggestive anticipation, as he advanced to take her by the arm. But she stepped quickly away.

‘Let me alone, she said.

‘Don’t be absurd,’ he said, angrily. He contrived to put a nasty threat into the words.

She said nothing, but watched him. He should not touch her.

‘Come!’ he said menacingly. He was half afraid of his seething rage against her.

Anna watched him with cold grey eyes. And once more he attempted to take hold of her, coming very near, so that his brownish, neat face was close to hers.

‘Please go away,’ she said, avoiding him.

‘Why should I go?’ cried Matthew, looking at the silent girl with a grimace of fury. Her indifferent face looked back at him, pale and stubborn.

‘Why should I go away?’ Am I to be turned out of my own house by my own wife?’ There was a dangerous menace in the ridiculous question.

Anna stood still, her heart cold as stone. She felt that the strain of the suspense and the unpleasantness must kill her. She wondered whether she ought to tell him about the child. But she did not. She could not bring herself to tell him.

She moved towards the door. Matthew came after her, grasping at her, and her heart beat thickly, for she knew it was a fight to the death between them. She would never submit to him. Her will was ultimately set against that, hard and inflexible. She put out her arms to keep him off.

‘Don’t think you can get away from me,’ he bullied. He contorted his face, the neat lips half smiling. There was something fundamentally obscene in his expression. Anna shrank back. She was trembling. And she was repelled. Her whole soul sickened in repulsion.

‘Come here!’ he cried, in a mad frenzy, snarling, rabid. He seized her by the arms and dragged her to him. A cord snapped in Anna’s heart. Her eyes and her face stony, she struggled against him. His mad, fixed, glowering eyes were close to hers. She strained back. It was the final battle between her and him. She felt herself utterly calm and cold. She had become simply an instrument of pure resistance. She jerked herself half out of his grip, and fought her way, struggling, to the door. He still held her by one arm, and clung to her fiercely, but she was almost at the door.

She knew that if once she could get out of the room she was safe. He would not follow her. So she concentrated on the door, to reach it and free herself. He was panting and desperate. She saw his face above hers brown and neat still, with eyes like pieces of blue glass, meaningless, yet full of a mad obstinacy and a horrible frenzied lust. He should not conquer her, this hateful, non-human creature who was so much stronger than she. In loathing of his smooth, monkeyish strength she writhed and struggled and twisted in his grasp. But he would not release her. He swung her off her feet, and struck at her with his free hand, his eyes murderous. She felt a stab of nightmare panic; yet really, at heart, she was calm and even indifferent. Then his arm and his clenched fist came down hard across her chest. Instinctively she ducked her head to protect her face. The next blow fell on her neck. The next on her shoulders. Then, suddenly, he let go of her entirely. For a moment, she was as if stunned.

She recovered her equilibrium and stood still, her face sombre and fixed. She felt that something had broken in her. Matthew stood dumb, confounded. Gradually a sort of horror dawned on his face, incredulous.

‘What am I doing?’ he said, in strange gulping tones. A queer, complicated grimace disfigured him. His face seemed to disintegrate. He seemed to collapse all at once, to fall in upon himself.

Anna looked at him, turned, and went out of the room. It was over: she had conquered him. But she felt wounded to death; violated and defiled. It was the end of everything. Now she must die. There was nothing else left.

Trembling slightly, she went downstairs and opened the door of the house. The night was quite black, like a black hole, and full of wild ripping and rushing noises. The violence of the wind struck her like a flat blow. The palm tree in front leaned over in an extraordinary thin arch, its leaves almost touching the ground. Across the sky, from horizon to horizon, ran blazing paths of lightning, changing and bifurcating. And deep, ponderous rolls of thunder broke above the wind, ominously, like judgments given against mankind.

Anna stood still, watching the bent palm tree, which seemed to her very fantastic and unreal. She was still trembling, and weak. She felt that she had come to the end of her life. She wanted to get away from the house, away from Matthew. She felt she could never endure to see him again, or to hear his voice. She had the sense of something being broken inside her. Her feet seemed heavy and very far off.

She dragged herself out of the house. As she went out, the wind swept upon her, as though to carry her away, up into the air. She felt that it was shaking her. to bits, that she must presently disappear in this void of windy dark. Something pained her shoulders, hurting her, but she struggled on.

She was lonely, and lost. She was in an ugly, repulsive nightmare which terrified her and degraded her. And the only way out of the nightmare was to die. She did not think how she should die. Something was broken and destroyed in her. She had come to an end. It was all repulsive and strange: and incoherent. There was no rational sequence of cause and effect.

Struggling along in the dark, she saw the tremendous writhing tumult of the great trees, streaming and roaring overhead, and flying darkly against the sky. She turned away from the trees, to avoid them. She was afraid of the trees because she had once seen a python, looped and hanging from a branch, and swaying a little, with a kind of hideous, revolting negligence, at the end of a deep glade. She would not go to the trees.

So she went on, lost and solitary, in the black, crashing wilderness, without thought. The lightning blazed bluishly from moment to moment, revealing a spasmodic, ghostly world. She was very tired and desolate, drowned deeply in the nightmare and the black night, far from any security.

Suddenly she was aware of something new. Something was flying in the air, a swarm of cold, heavy insects flying in her face, striking her skin with flat, cold bodies. It was the rain beginning. The first great drops struck her in the dark, like beetles. She shuddered, and caught her breath.