Anna Kavan - Guilty

Her loveliness made me more aware of my ugly, heavy cold, which became exaggerated into something shameful. As if by contrast with her perfection, even my brain had grown ugly and stupid; its slow stupid thoughts didn’t seem to belong to me. I felt altogether strange and unlike myself, a combination of shame and incapacity having replaced the person I really was, and this seemed to be her deliberate doing. Sudden resentment flared through my daze. Why should she make me ashamed of having a cold? Her beauty, which had charmed me the previous moment, had turned into a source of grievance. The memory of yesterday’s unexplained painful events at her home thrust itself upon me, and a crowd of urgent questions clamoured for answers. ‘Why did you leave me alone so long in the library? Had you arranged to meet that official? Who is he? Just how well do you know him? Why haven’t you ever mentioned him to me?’ Instead of any of these, I asked abruptly, ‘Why are you in the dark?’ at the same time switching on the strong centre light we hardly ever used.

This instinctive attempt to destroy her composure did not succeed, for, though the sudden light made her blink, she remained imperturbable as before. I had only exposed myself, and I stood revealed as a boorish, uncivilized lout to whom she would be eternally inaccessible.

Beginning to sink back hopelessly into stupefaction, to rouse myself I started pacing the room, deliberately working myself up to make a scene, determined to penetrate her calm. If I couldn’t reach her, at least I would make her angry and bring her down nearer my own level. To concentrate on this was a fearful effort; my dull, estranged thoughts kept sliding away from me into blankness. But I stubbornly continued my pacing, persistently dwelling on the things I resented, as if with somebody else’s brain, taking care not to look at Carla; who, realizing no doubt the futility of trying any reasonable approach while I was in this mood, kept silent and out of sight.

Presently I felt a faint itch of curiosity, wanting to know what she was doing. Stealing a furtive glance, I saw her bending over some frail wintry flowers she had brought, arranging them in a bowl on the table, her expression absorbed and withdrawn. Her cool, private self-sufficiency struck me as being assumed for the purpose of hurting and excluding me. Yet she seemed like some fabulous being at the same time, as if she wasn’t quite human; an ice maiden, perhaps, intent on her delicate frost flowers and immune from our emotions.

A sudden monstrous desire to hurt her transfixed me; I wanted to assert my gross earthly condition over her ethereal otherness. What I experienced wasn’t so much a wish as an uncontrollable upthrust of malice, springing from unexplored depths of my being — depths so strange and unsuspected that they seemed utterly alien, augmenting the disconcerting sense of estrangement from my own self. I couldn’t bear this sense of a stranger’s vindictiveness, it was torture to me but a torture incorporating a perverse satisfaction as when one intentionally bites on an aching tooth.

After the one quick glance, I hadn’t looked at Carla again. But the flowers, directly under the light, caught and held my eyes and I stopped to stare at them. All at once it struck me that they were staring back; their pale, still, imperturbable faces were lifted to me in utter indifference, deputizing for the girl’s face at which I would not look. This was the very last straw. The insult of those inhuman flower faces in league with her inhumanity against me was more than I could endure. I had to shut them out of my sight.

My hand began moving upwards to cover my eyes; then, with a weird sensation of abstract malice, I felt it shoot out suddenly in a different direction, like the hand of another person, crashing into something smooth and hard and sending it flying, while, above the noise of smashing china, I heard incoherent shouting. ‘I can’t stand the sight of those things — don’t bring them into the place — so far and no further — it doesn’t belong to you, and neither do I — yet.’

The excitement I’d been working so hard to raise surged over me and for a second swept me beyond myself. Gradually then it dawned on me that the cold-strangled voice with the ugly overtone of hysteria was my own; and with this realization the madness, delirium, or whatever it was, expired exactly as though it had never been, leaving only an incubus, a weight like a bad dream, from which I couldn’t wake, pinning me down and dividing me from the world. As if I’d dropped asleep on my feet, I stood mute and inert, no more than an upright mass of dead matter, except for a single point of anxiety, buried very deep down, warning me of sensation to come, some time in the future.

Water, streaming over the table, cascaded on to the floor, carrying with it some of the scattered flowers, their fragile petals already bruised and crumpled. Without feeling I stared at the havoc I had created, unable to face the reality of what I’d done. It was as if my nerves had gone dead. There was the havoc, and the reality of it was there, like a man with his shadow, but the two wouldn’t come together. I kept my eyes lowered, not wanting to see Carla. The thought, I must apologize, was in my head but, like everything else, rendered meaningless and cut off from me by the heaviness, as of sleep, which oppressed me.

She was the one who spoke first, asking me, with no trace of emotion, to stand aside, leaning over the table and wiping it with a cloth and, only when she’d cleared up the mess, confronting me very directly to say, ‘Why don’t you break off our engagement instead of trying to provoke me to do it for you?’

I heard the words and understood them; but the pressure of aching heaviness in my head kept their meaning apart, and, to my mind peering through curtains of strangeness, it seemed barely possible that an answer should be expected of me. All I could do was to raise my head, most laboriously as if heaving up some unwieldy great object, so that we came face to face. Her lovely paleness, untroubled-seeming as always, again reminded me of a snow maiden — cold, disheartening association — with large lustrous eyes looking at me darkly from far away. But, thought I — someone else’s dull thoughts churning away in my dazed state — a snow maiden should have blue eyes or green, the colour of ice-shadows in a crevasse. Instead, there were these two dark crystals, very lovely and very strange. Was this all the strangeness I’d always seen in her face? Could the whole secret be merely that she had the wrong-coloured eyes?

The distracting question opened and shut ephemeral wings on the brink of the situation, where Carla, beautiful and unreal, awaited the answer I could not feel called upon to give.

Finally she spoke again. ‘I’ve felt for some time that you didn’t want to go on. But I hoped you’d be honest enough to tell me. However …’

The last word was scarcely more than a sigh. Still she watched, still expecting me to say something. Nothing suggested itself. What could I possibly say to a snow maiden? Her watchful eyes made me uneasy, and I started frantically searching my empty head, turning out every cupboard and dusty corner but only to find a few Latin phrases and names of schoolboys, unremembered for years. I was thankful when she relieved me of this fruitless quest for speech and slowly turned to the chair on which she’d left her outdoor things. I watched her move in bright, ethereal otherness among the ponderous down-to-earth shapes of the furniture, and my throat ached because she would soon be gone, back to whatever enchanted country she came from. But I did nothing to stop her going — that didn’t seem to be in my power.

I felt utterly unfamiliar to myself, inextricably mixed up with headache and heaviness; and there was always that oppressiveness on me, like a waking sleep. The high room was so still I fancied that I could hear the tiny electric crackle of Carla’s hair as she combed it; and somewhere a drop of water fell regularly as a clock ticking, marking the seconds, while everything seemed to wait in suspense as she went to the door.