Anna Kavan - Guilty

Though the powerful beams of the headlights recalled me instantly from this vision, it interfered for a moment with my view of the car and the snowstorm and Carla, standing in the porch, so asserting its uncomprehended significance. But before I could even ask myself what it meant, the sequence of events it had interrupted was once more restored. History seemed to be repeating itself when Spector emerged from the car into the white whirling dance of the snowflakes, which the light, spreading up, thickened into a falling fabric over his head, a faintly shimmering canopy.

Reverting to those two occasions my memory had retained so distinctly, I now felt the same shock, his presence seemed to assert itself with the same stark vividness, in the same abruptly portentous fashion. I only saw his face for a second before he turned to the girl, turning his back on me as if to confirm my rejection, so that I saw him as I had on Christmas Day and knew I’d recognized him even then.

So acutely was I conscious of him that when he took Carla’s arm to lead her back indoors I felt his dominant possessiveness and his insistent will, as though it were my arm he was holding. My eyes confused by the shifting pattern of snowflakes, and my mind by the weirdly shifting flux of personalities and unstable time, I couldn’t locate myself anywhere in my life. I couldn’t understand the strange blend of nostalgia and resentment that filled me until, for the second time, my mother’s image appeared, and I wanted to rush to Carla and pull her back, out of the tranquillity of her daydreaming face, because of my dream of the past, which ended so catastrophically.

My own dream was already ended, and that I was to have no part in hers was made clear by the way she and her companion were briefly outlined against the bright oblong of the open door, so closely joined by their linked arms that they might have been one. Despairing loneliness overwhelmed me as the door closed behind this composite figure of my two loves, now mysteriously become one and the same, excluding me with such decisive finality that I could only submit, as to a sentence passed on me long ago.

The lights went out. I felt at the same time a shift in my situation and that I’d been delivered into the power of my past. For a moment that seemed eternal I stood there, balanced precariously, high up in the darkness, bewildered by the unstable pallor forever falling out of a black sky, coldly, ghostlily, touching me and dissolving and touching again.

Somehow my surroundings were changing. I was afraid. It was dangerous for me to stay here, yet I dared not stir, pits of nothingness opening on every side. The world was dissolving in darkness and danger. Nothing was solid or safe any more in this high, unstable place, where a wan paleness wavered and fell like light through dense wind-shaken foliage. The very foundations of reality had begun to dissolve. I didn’t know where I was, either in space or in my existence. Lost in the deepest possible sense, I’d lost even the reality of my life in the world. My real self was dissolving, falling away from me. To my horror I felt myself some small, despised, abject thing — some kind of vermin — without teeth or claws or any means of protection, the most defenceless creature alive, hated and hunted by all the rest. My destruction was their common duty, an easy task, accomplished by one weak blow.

Utterly vulnerable, at the mercy of the whole world, I was waiting alone in this high, rocking insecurity — from which I already seemed to have watched myself deserted by all I had once trusted — for the vengeance racing towards me out of the past. In full cry, the past was hunting me down, and I knew myself now eternally doomed and hated, a criminal, outcast, isolated by guilt from all other living things, rejected by life itself. There could be no expiation and no escape, except by the door into senseless blackness through which I had once sent –

As a nightmare breaks before the falling dreamer can hit the ground, before the past could swoop down on me, completing the memory, the situation shifted again. I was once more myself, though confused and diminished far beyond rational thought by the dreadful and dream-like strangeness of these latest experiences, which my sense of reality could barely survive.

My memory of what followed has always remained unclear. I have only a vague impression of reeling away from that place and afterwards of walking endlessly through the falling snow, which obscured the atmosphere and smothered the town in unnatural silence, its huge flakes swarming around the lights, which at long intervals punctuated the empty street, stretching ahead of me to infinity.

I remember how from time to time the pale, undulating veil parted and buildings, hugely distorted, loomed up like skyscrapers and how the white carpet, always thickening under foot, hid the edges of the pavement but would not bear my weight, so that I stumbled often and almost fell. I had the idea that the paving stones grew all the time larger, so that if I could have seen them I wouldn’t have been able to stride from one to the next. I know I was dead tired and moved very slowly with the great effort of every step. And it seemed I would never arrive anywhere but must go on for ever like this, through the interminable, purgatorial, snowy streets, till at last I dropped from exhaustion. It would be very pleasant, I thought, to lie down on the untrodden white and let the snow cover me and hide my guilt out of sight; and I remember thinking how I’d pull this coverlet over my head, as I used to pull up the bedclothes when I was a child and wanted to hide from some disappointment or shame. But for some reason it wasn’t allowed now, and I had to keep moving, alone as surely I’d never been before, in the silent cold night, irremediably forsaken, all warmth, all affection, everything I had loved and trusted withdrawn from me absolutely and for all time.

What comes back to me when I think about it is a childish loneliness and forlornness, growing gradually into that feeling of being lost and internally cold that used to bewilder me during the hard winter of my mother’s indifference long ago, when I piled logs on the fires but could light no corresponding warmth in her heart or my own. It was only the cold inside me of which I was conscious; I don’t recollect feeling cold in my body, though I’d been so long in the snow without the overcoat that I had, of course, forgotten when I rushed out of the flat. I suppose I was feverish and indebted to fever for this resurgence of those old feelings of deprivation and frustrated love that I substituted for others less bearable, which should have been my concern. At all events, I was ill after this and ran a high temperature for several days.

How I eventually got home I don’t know; nor do I know how or why the caretaker’s wife came to appoint herself my nurse, for she neither asked nor volunteered anything and indeed rarely spoke to me at all. Until now I’d only been vaguely aware of this strange, silent woman, who never spoke to anyone as she went in or out of the building and always wore the same blank, discouraging face; but now I was glad she was looking after me, for she wouldn’t gossip, I knew, about anything I might let slip while the fever was at its height.

Throughout this period my guilt pursued me relentlessly, evidence of it appearing frequently in my surroundings, convincing me that I was directly responsible for my parents’ deaths. If I had really planned the double murder in cold blood I could hardly have experienced greater torments of distress and self-loathing than those I suffered in the hallucinatory fever world, where images from the past mingled confusingly in my head with more recent memories.

Wherever I looked, I saw reminders of my crime. The harmless ceiling geography of cracks and stains changed before my eyes into the disastrous mushroom shape of explosion, spouting horrid details, fragments of limbs and clothing. If my gaze fixed itself on the bedspread, the oriental design would soon become a sort of exotic jungle, out of which sneering, sub-human faces would peer, reminiscent of the sinister chessmen at school.