Anna Kavan - I Am Lazarus

LIE BU WE — about 300 B.C.

WHY did he leave me, I wonder? It seems almost incredible that less than a week has passed — only a few days, in fact — since I was preparing an evening meal for us both in this very room. How happy we were that evening. Or perhaps I ought to say, How happy I was: for events have turned out so differently from my expectations that I feel more than ever astray in the world, as though all my life I had been working along lines that had no relation at all to reality. When appearances prove so deceptive, one's own sensations are all that one really has to rely on; and I can say, at least, without any doubt, that I was extremely happy that evening.

It was, perhaps, the second or third meal we had eaten together in the little house; the house to which I had moved on purpose to be in the same district of the city as this auburn stranger who had dropped into my life as if from the clouds, bringing with him a happiness I had not expected to feel again.

It seemed such a gay little house then, with its yellow shutters, its steep ladder-like flight of stairs, and its small, oddly-shaped rooms, each one painted a different colour. There was the living room all pale green like the springtime trees beneath which we walked every day after my work was finished; the bedroom coloured like almond blossom; the kitchen blue and white like one of those plates on which one traced as a child endless magic journeys.

I see that I have written in the past tense as if these rooms I'm describing no longer existed: and yet here I am, in that same blue and white kitchen where I was so happily preparing our meal that evening only the other day, when he said to me casually: ‘Some time you will write about this because all that is beautiful must triumph for all.’

And I answered (I remember that I was taking an earthenware dish out of the oven at the moment and thinking more about that than about what I was saying), I answered: ‘Yes, when it is all over between us, then I suppose I shall write down what I remember because nothing else of you will be left to me.’

The outward aspect of the house is still precisely the same as it was when those words were spoken. The paint is still fresh on the walls, the yellow shutters still present a frivolous brightness to the passers-by. It is only the character of the place which in this short time has become altogether different. Its personality has changed. It is not gay any longer. Oh, no, certainly gaiety has no connection whatever with these coloured walls which surround me with their implacable reminder of lost joy. Outer appearances remain unaltered, but the spirit which inspired every form with meaning has vanished, leaving only a shell behind.

When I look round at my few possessions, each one of which carries inextricably in its essence some amusing or tender association, I feel as though I were confronting a dear relative, perhaps a brother, whose brain a sudden tragedy had unhinged. Everything is the same; the features, the figure, the hair: only the one vital element is missing without which the human being has no significance, no entity, no individual soul.

I have never heard of anybody who loved a mad person. I should think it would be impossible to do so. Pity or aversion one would feel, but not love. And the feelings I have for this house are a blend of aversion and pity, exactly as they would be for someone very close to me whose personality had deteriorated until there finally remained no more possibility whatever of contact between us.

Sometimes it is almost horror that comes over me at the sight of these rooms, these objects, for which the whole raison d ’ê tre , as it were, has been taken away. Why do these walls still stand? When every day and night, all over the city, buildings are being struck down, why does this house remain intact? How can it so obstinately fail to disintegrate, seeing that it no longer has any chance of fulfilling the purpose for which I first decided to occupy it?

Yes, it's just as if one were forced to live with someone out of his mind, or, worse still, with the actual physical corpse of a loved person which a diabolical chemistry had rendered immune from the process of dissolution.

The words with which I began writing, the words, ‘Why did he leave me?’ keep recurring to me although I try to drive them away. What's the use of tormenting myself with speculations about this man, dressed always in blue, whose arrival I did not witness and who departed in silence and unobserved? It is only necessary for me to know that he has gone, that he is far away, and that he will not return. Suddenly he left me, without warning or explanation, without saying good-bye. If I had known his intention that evening, could I have said or done anything to influence his decision? That is a question I often vainly consider, alone in these rooms which now have no meaning for me.

And why indeed should one expect to find a meaning in walls, in windows, or in a book that is not to be found on the shelf? In a city where everything is chaotic and inexplicable and where one is constantly beset by all kinds of death, annihilation, destruction and grief it is something, at all events, to be able to say: ‘On that evening’, or ‘On such and such a day, I was happy’.

I've tried hard to solve the bitter riddle which brought me across the world to this place of misfortune when all I wished was freedom to live in peace, in sunshine, in a country where birds had not learnt to fly in terror from the sound of a falling bomb. Lately I've been thinking that possibly all these happenings are bound up together. That perhaps the man in the blue suit with whom I was happy, the man who left me so abruptly and, as it superficially appears, so unkindly, perhaps he was, in some obscure way, connected with my sentence; or even came with the express purpose of putting into my hands a clue which, if properly followed, would finally lead to the truth and make clear the justice of all these catastrophes which have fallen upon me.

How otherwise than as an unfulfilled obligation, and therefore as an indictment, can I translate that phrase of his, which at the time passed almost unnoticed, but which now seems to me to be the crux of the whole matter: ‘All that is beautiful must triumph for all’?

Now that those days are as dead as the grave and I have so much time on my hands I feel a great and persistent need to record something of the relationship between myself and my brother. And the fact that I'm allowed to do so (indeed, I'm even encouraged to write by the provision of pencils and, in spite of the paper shortage, of plenty of cheap foolscap paper) makes me believe that perhaps those better able to judge than I have discerned in the long, submerged struggle between the two of us an example which may prove valuable to other people in the same sort of unfortunate circumstances.

There's plenty of time now to think back. Plenty of time to remember, to contemplate, to reflect on the disconnected, small, distant pictures which go to compose the whole gloomy canvas.

Sitting here in this lonely little room, without friends, without a future, without even a dream; sitting here hour after hour, listening to the sea's curious muffled bass which incorporates at irregular intervals a voice-like contralto pleading, I've arrived at certain decisions. I've decided to make a kind of precis, not a detailed analysis because that's beyond my powers, but a brief sketch of the pattern which my brother and I traced out in our mutual reactions. I'm not doing this in the hope of any amelioration of my own position (that I fully realize is out of the question and I don't even desire it); nor because I am inspired by an altruistic wish for others to profit by my misfortune; but simply because I want to get things clear in my own mind, and the best way to get things clear is to get them all written down.