Anna Kavan - Guilty

At the last, at the open door, unbearably, she turned to look at me again, the dark landing behind her. I had no nerves, no emotions; I was asleep. And yet I couldn’t stand it and quickly looked away. And when I looked back at the door she was no longer there. I saw only the dark empty space where she’d been standing, as if the darkness had taken her with a huge black, silent hand while I wasn’t looking. All I heard was her light descending step on the stairs, receding from me, flight after flight, into the dark depths of the empty house; and, at the end, the final muted thump of the outer door.

My heart gave a great bound, and something went through me like lightning, like steel, that might have been either despair or triumph. It was all over. I had known all along. Now I’d achieved my object, the thing I most dreaded and most desired. I was alone again, unloving, unloved, as I always had been and would always be, world without end. At this moment of spontaneous revelation, the truth emerged, unmistakably, everywhere and in everything: shouted by the vast indifferent glacial silence of night and stars, petrified in the forever-suspended drop, proclaimed by the disposition of flowers, no longer scattered at random. For a timeless instant there was nothing but this hugely significant truth.

Then, slowly, I was aware of myself again, some tiresome detail of external reality would persist in molesting me, bringing me back to concrete things, to the light shining straight into my eyes. Mechanically, I moved a few steps out of the glare and, by making this automatic movement, fractured the spell. I couldn’t return to where I had been. Slowly turning my head, I surveyed the room, which seemed both familiar and strange, like a room remembered from years ago. What had happened to me in this room? What had I been doing here?

Memory flooded back, and with it came a terrible black wave of desolation and loss; sweeping out of the dark building below, it towered over my head and exploded in soundless thunder, obliterating all thought, leaving only the urgent need to follow, to find — a need as elemental and all-excluding as the need for breath, displacing all other needs and thoughts.

I have no clear recollection of what came next, only of flying headlong from the house and of running, running, as if for dear life, stumbling and slipping in the icy streets, my footsteps shattering the stern nocturnal hush, seeing nothing, but all the time staring wildly about me, though whom I so frantically sought I didn’t know. I have the impression that the streets were empty and that I met no one; but if they’d been crowded I probably wouldn’t have noticed, so oblivious was I of everything but the one consuming need for a person without a name, without whom I couldn’t live.

Somehow I must have got myself on to a bus, though I remember nothing about it except the conductor repeating, ‘This is as far as we go’, and looking at me very strangely. He must have said it several times already, for he shouted the words, doubtless thinking I was deaf, and when even then I didn’t immediately understand him he glared at me fiercely, as if he suspected me of playing some trick on him, shaking my shoulder to get rid of me or wake me up. Horrified by the grasp of his large hand, which half recalled to me something that fearfully threatened, I jumped up and off the bus. But, once on the pavement, I had enough presence of mind to remember to walk slowly till I was out of his sight, only when I got around the corner starting to race away, with no thought for where I was going.

When breathlessness and a sharp, stabbing pain with each breath made me slow down, I didn’t recognize my surroundings. The buildings seemed to have drawn back haughtily from the street, which trailed off into obscurity in the distance. Beside me a high brick wall rose perpendicular and unbroken by doors or windows, indeterminate black masses looming beyond; but it didn’t dawn on me that I’d reached a suburb till I made out the bare skeleton of a tree. The odd thing was that, though I didn’t know where I was, I instinctively turned in at an entrance gate and unhesitatingly passed through into the dark drive without pausing to wonder why, at this hour of the night, the gate should have been standing wide open.

The house was all in darkness, except for two lighted windows flanking the pillared porch, tall pointed win dows I must have noticed without being aware of it on Christmas Day, for I remembered them now. It was, of course, Carla’s home to which I’d been brought, as if by a will quite separate from my own. As I looked at it, the curtain of one of these windows was pulled aside, and with a kind of inevitability Carla herself appeared and stood looking out with an expectant air.

I was startled, for she seemed to be looking straight at me, and I hurriedly stepped aside, into a bank at the edge of the drive, up which I scrambled. Safely out of sight at the top, I could still see her peering out, as though she knew I was there somewhere in the darkness but with an odd uncertainty most unlike her usual steady gaze. For a second I couldn’t focus the memory it recalled; and then my mother’s image appeared so vividly that I could almost hear my own unkind boy’s laughter mocking her superstition, and caught an instantaneous glimpse of similar resentful motives for my recent bad conduct. This backward flash over, I found myself thinking, even in my muddled state, that since Carla presumably was the person I’d been chasing with such urgency, I should have attracted her notice instead of avoiding it. But I had no real comprehension of my own acts or of anything else. And now her face was no longer clear. I couldn’t even be sure that I’d really seen her at the window. This uncertainty, I realized, was entirely down to mental confusion. Something seemed to be wrong with my eyes, which I was continually rubbing as if wiping away tears, and it came back to me that for some time as I hurried along I’d been trying to clear my vision in this way.

Looking up now, I was astonished to see a great flock of small white birds descending on me, filling the air, gliding and hovering all about me, so close their cold wing-tips brushed my cheeks and forehead. I waved my arms to scare them away. But they came at me still more thickly, hiding the window and diving and darting right into my face as if to peck out my eyes and blind me altogether. When I saw that they weren’t birds at all but great snowflakes I watched them, fascinated, as I’d always been in my childhood, by their ceaseless falling and turning, a palely glistening cur tain that drifted down without end or beginning, lightly shaken from time to time by some wandering air current as it changed direction and sent small eddies scurrying to and fro.

Suddenly, startlingly, two level beams came swinging around from the street, drove purposefully through the glimmering stuff and pointed straight at the house, lighting it up, though I myself was passed over and left to merge indistinguishably with the anonymous dark. In that setting, where all was vague, fluctuating and tenuous, these twin beams seemed, to my equally vague state of mind, to show an almost concrete definition and purpose, driving right to the heart of the situation, which was my rejection, while brightly illuminating what was forbidden to me.

I saw that they came from the headlights of a big car that had silently stopped just below me. And, instantly, I was transported to quite another time and place, gazing down with a child’s awed astonishment at the great black beetle filling the width of the lane; then, aware of the weight of my rifle, watching the miraculous-seeming arrival at the foot of the school boundary wall.

These backward excursions confused my already un certain identity even more. How could I be sure who I really was? To make the confusion worse, another picture now came before me, perhaps the memory of a dream, perhaps originating in some actual scene from the past, but transposed into a different dimension, where the face of apparent reality seemed about to drop, like a mask, to reveal the unimaginable strangeness behind. I was walking along the water’s edge on an interminable beach of pale sand, following someone’s footprints, which the small colourless waves were forever obliterating, though not so thoroughly that I ever lost sight of them ahead between the smooth, untrodden ellipses left by the water. Except for myself, the beach was absolutely forsaken, the sea on one side, and on the other walled in by high unscalable dunes. It seemed to have no end, and there was no escape from it, under the pale, tight-fitting lid of sky.