Anna Kavan - I Am Lazarus

I was so disconcerted that for a minute I simply stared at him. Then it began to dawn on me that the thing which has so often happened to me in this country had happened again, that I had made a mistake, that I had fallen into the trap of accepting as real an appearance that was merely a sham, a booby trap, a malicious trick. The old man was very near me and I could, see his teeth yellow and broken and bad like rat's teeth under his ragged moustache, and his vindictive red-rimmed eyes gummy with rheum. How could I ever have thought he had a benevolent face? What a fool I was to be so easily taken in.

But you must remember my picture, I pleaded, not yet quite able, in spite of everything, to despair. Speaking with a contemptible note of propitiation I began to describe our previous interview, recalling what had been said on that occasion. The old man waited unwillingly. I could not tell whether he was even listening to me as he stood, glancing about, and thrusting a long black pencil in and out of a tuft of straggly hair just above his ear.

Yes, yes, he interrupted irritably in the end, and going once more to the door of the other room where I could now see an apprentice in a white apron at work at a table.

Perhaps it's in there, my precious picture, I thought. I no longer had the least trace of confidence in the old shopkeeper. I felt convinced, just as I had with the girl, that he had no intention of finding the picture, would not so much as look for it, even if he were not, as seemed only too probable, actually hiding it from me. If only I could go in and look round for myself perhaps I should see it somewhere, I was thinking, when he rudely shut the door in my face.

So strong was my desire for the picture that I think I might have tried to force my way into the room to hunt for it. And that in spite of the fact that I knew I ought to leave the shop at once, at that very moment, that I had stayed too long already. I think I would have chanced everything if the old man had not opened the door a crack just then and whispered, Perhaps you would be able to describe the picture to me? His face was close, much too close to mine, and I saw his mouth with its disgusting rat's teeth twisting into an indescribably sly and venomous sneer, while at the very same instant the man in the shop behind me, whose face I had not seen, uttered a sound that could only have been a suppressed laugh. Yes, they were both laughing. And I had no doubt about who was the victim of their cruel joke. The girl and the apprentice in the white apron were certainly having a good laugh, too, at my expense although I couldn't see or hear either of them from where I was standing.

I stumbled out of the place somehow. I was so humiliated, so disappointed, that I hardly knew what I was doing and turned in the wrong direction when I got into the street. The sun had stopped shining now, a dismal wind blew the dust in eddies presaging rain.

How terribly long and hard the winters seem when one is far from home.

THINGS turn out so strangely and unexpectedly in one's life. If anybody had told me a few years back that people would be coming to me for information about the authorities I shouldn't have been able to help laughing. When one's a free agent nothing seems more fantastically improbable than the idea of being entangled with officialdom. Stories about those who get involved with the authorities don't seem to have a personal application at all; if anything, they strengthen one's sense of immunity. Those sort of things may happen to other people, I used to think; but not to me. I was inclined then to adopt a superior, slightly pitying, slightly contemptuous attitude towards unluckier individuals as if they had only themselves to blame for their troubles. In those days I hadn't yet learnt that the authorities are really not concerned with a person's motives or his private character or even with his public behaviour, and that somebody quite blameless (as we think) may easily become deeply implicated simply through a slight oversight or perhaps a technical error only due to a lack of information which is certainly not his fault.

The fact of the matter, of course, is that no one can be sure of avoiding trouble; the completely innocent person perhaps least of all; because he, unsuspicious, and lulled into a false sense of security by his clear conscience, is liable to overlook some little formality that may bring him under official notice. Just such a slip is all that's needed to set the ball rolling. Official procedure is always incalculable, but the one thing we can count on is that once a name has come before the authorities, in no matter how harmless a context, it will never be expunged from the records. A name appears, let us say, on some absolutely trivial pretext; perhaps even because of a civic action that would be accounted creditable by ordinary standards. Immediately the whole ponderous mechanism is engaged, countless wheels start to revolve, new ledgers are opened, documents are drawn up, in who knows how many different departments whole staffs of clerks set to work searching and correlating and noting and filing, until, in a surprisingly short time, a huge dossier is prepared. And from this dossier, which is constantly being revised and brought up to date, the subject can never hope to escape until his death. Some people go further still, and say that the dossier is extended to include the direct descendants of the original subject, so that anyone who has had a relative under observation is himself automatically suspect. Personally, however, I disagree with such an extreme view which, if correct, would implicate someone in practically every family.

It's the lack of reliable information about these matters and the crop of legends and superstitions that have grown out of ignorance which make a person who is, or who thinks he is likely to be, in trouble, turn to anybody who seems to have the least understanding of official affairs. That's why people have started coming to me; though heaven knows I can do little to help them. Certainly, during the last few years, I've had a great deal of experience in dealing with the authorities; and because, on the whole, things haven't gone entirely against me, a rumour has got round that I've evolved some specially successful technique of my own. In reality I'm convinced that any approach systematic enough to be called a technique would be far too rigid to stand a chance of success in dealing with the authorities whose reactions are essentially capricious, unpredictable and inconsistent. But this view is not readily acceptable to outsiders, obsessed as they are by the fantasy of official logic, and confused as well by the conflicting theories of their advisors.

But look here, they say to me: Surely there must be some hidden laws governing these obscure processes. Admittedly a lot of official business seems quite senseless and contradictory to us. But isn't it probable that behind it all there is an understandable formula which, once we have grasped it, will make order out of what previously looked like confusion? Shouldn't we really devote all our energies to a diligent search for such a key?

It's hard to give a satisfactory answer to this; and I sometimes think that an account of an actual case points a clearer moral than any amount of talk: as, for instance, A's Case.

I've known A nearly all my life. Latterly, since I've had so many dealings in official quarters, I've come to recognize certain distinguising marks in people who are doomed to trouble with the authorities. I don't mean to say that everyone who is going to get into difficulties will bear these characteristics: but any person who does possess them is sure to go through a bad time sooner or later. A always had these distinguishing signs very strongly marked; but in earlier, happier days I was not aware of their significance.