Sleep Has His House by Anna Kavan
Heaven. The populous scene partly suggests a fairy-tale illustration, partly a picture from an old-fashioned Bible, partly the enchanted cave in a pantomime. Broad brilliant azure sky with cloud cushions on which parties of angels recline. To the left, a landscape of flowery fields where numerous saints and seraphs are strolling about or sitting on the seats placed as if in a park. Fountains playing, birds singing, rivulets rippling. The grass is brilliantly green, the flowers sparkle like jewels, instead of bridges rainbows span the streams, the benches are made out of solid gold.
At the centre, in tiered majestic gradations, there soar, enormously, steps of intense and dazzling white alabaster. Endless streams of angelic figures move in stately procession up and down this colossal stairway which presumably leads to the Throne.
On the right, seen panoramically at a lower level, a sort of huge skating-rink, blastingly bright and surrounded by dense gold-crowned, white-robed crowds. From here rises, very remote, very impressive, words indistinguishable, a vast volume of community hymn-singing with vox humana and massed bands accompaniment. When the communal howl dies away there is a sharp prolonged staccato rattle, something like a burst of machine-gun fire, as the saints pitch their crowns on to the glittering surface in front of them.
Now, at the extremities of the stair, appear seraphim whose lifted trumpets discharge notes in crisp upward cadence. The crowds on the right relax after their vocalism, break into groups, laughing and talking, and slowly begin to disperse. They give the impression of lighting up cigarettes, pushing their haloes on to the backs of their heads and then putting their hands in their pockets, although of course they don’t do these things. While they are strolling away a band of children romp gaily at the foot of the stairs, playing touch-last with the cherubs, whose muslin wings are attached to their shoulders by braces of tinsel braid. The children are all about the same age, twelve to fourteen years old, sexually indeterminate, very china-dollishly pretty, with rosebud mouths and beautiful curly hair.
The little girl B (she is an unobtrusive spectator in the foreground) watches the children admiringly as they dance into the fields and begin making the flowers into chains and posies. (As each flower is picked another immediately springs up in its place.)
B is obviously very much charmed by all that she sees, although slightly overawed. She stands first on one foot and then on the other, looking all round, anxious not to miss anything, but not liking to move away from a bush which partly conceals her and is somewhat ostentatiously decorated with large silver twinkling stars.
The whole scene is humming with holy business, cheerful and social and sanctified at the same time; there is an audible hum too, the articulation of eternal, collectivized, innocent pleasure, a confused burble of music and distant singing; laughter, water, harps, birds, bells. Suddenly all this is stilled. Silence. A single bell chimes solemnly and with resonancefar away.
The smiles fade from the lips of the angels, the saints break off what they are saying and look grave, the children stand quietly with serious faces, the flowers hanging down in their hands. Every head turns in the same direction.
B looks to see what it is they are all looking at. While she has been facing the other way, A has appeared from some unnoted point, and now crosses the foreground, dressed all in black. She walks not slowly and not quickly, but in immense isolation, utterly separate from the shining crowds, at whom, in passing, she glances without envy or interest.
Timidly forsaking the bush which shelters her, B steps forward, starts after her mother.
At the same moment, two executives of the angelic order, severe in their robes, their faces shadowed by long pointed wings, advance, linked by a property arch which they carry between them. The arch, made out of gun-metal-coloured paper (the sort in which silver is sometimes wrapped to keep it from tarnishing), simulates a subway approach and bears a small neon sign in red letters EXIT TO HELL.
Supported by an angel on each side, the arch is set on the ground. The audience looks uneasily from side to side, whispers flying about. A walks under the arch with a strictly impassive face: she seems not to notice where she is going. The seraphim at the foot of the stairs raise their trumpets. The saintly crowds shift, shuffle, whisper, stare, lean forward, expressions of deploring pietude glazing avid curiosity; stare, seasoning sempiternal brightness with the zest of distant but contemporaneous shade.
The first notes of the trumpets are blown.
Just as the angels are preparing to carry the arch away B makes a desperate dash at it and dives through.
Everything blacks out—as if in an abrupt dense smoke-screen—as successive curtains of darkness are drawn. The faces of the child-angels last longest, porcelain painted with Os of insipid disparagement. On the obliteration of the last doll face, the hymn singing, very distantly, starts up again and continues, diminishing into final inaudibility, for a few seconds more.
What happens when you start on the downward trip? The elevator doors clang shut, a suffocating infernal wind roars up the shaft, it seems as though you’ll never get to the bottom; there’s plenty of time to wonder what’s coming and to wish yourself somewhere else. Of course there isn’t a hope of ever getting out again into the light. Once you’re on your way down the machinery takes charge of you, you’re caught, trapped, finished for good and all. Certainly there are legends about individuals who have escaped, even after reaching the final platforms. But these are heroes, fabulous figures who perhaps never really existed except as projections of wishful thinking in the minds of ordinary people. At any rate, they are far too dubious and remote to be of any real moral support or to provide any justifiable basis for optimism. You might just as well give in and pluck the cruel thorn of hope out of your heart. It’s always less painful to surrender to the stream of events than to turn yourself into a dam to be battered and pounded. It’s true that if the worst comes to the worst you’ll be drowned: but that’s better than being beaten to a jelly; and there’s always a slight chance that you may get washed ashore somewhere before the end.
And now, with regard to this drop into the lower regions, things really might be much worse. It’s no good pretending that you get the gaiety down here. You don’t get the variety or the excitement or the social or cultural life. If those were the things you were after you should have been much more prudent, you should have hung on to your original identity disk, number billion-billion-billion-whatever of the collectivists, instead of losing it somewhere or throwing it away in a fit of bravado. Then you could have trooped along to paradise with the rest and been one of the crowd for-ever-and-a-day. But since it’s happened like this, since you’ve been thrown out on your ear by the celestial party, or thrown yourself out, it makes no difference which way you put it, the only thing left is to adapt yourself as well as you can.
It’s lonely? Sure, it’s lonely. That’s what you asked for, didn’t you? After all, if you hadn’t been too superior for the gang, you wouldn’t be here. And think how much more distinguished it is to be on your own, or with one or two individualists like yourself, than to be an ordinary gregarious animal going about with the herd.
You miss the sun and air? Sure, you do. There are some million miles of solid obstruction between you and the free place where the wind blows and the birds sing in the sunshine. You’ll never feel the sun warming you any more. You’ll never hear the birds. No bird could live in this atmosphere, this ersatz air that eddies here in stale and fetid artificial gusts. But you can breathe in it and like it too. And in the end it will smell sweeter to you than a sea-breeze, just as this dim, unvaried and unfresh light will suit your eyes better than the vulgar sun.
You don’t like it here? Why didn’t you keep out, then, for God’s sake, while you had the chance? Anyhow, it’s no good moaning and snivelling now. Put a good face on it. Be tough. Show the crowd you can take it. You’re an individualist, aren’t you? To hell with the crowd. What do you care about them? You’re here because you’ve got no time for the crow
MY father thought I ought to be amongst other children, he sent me to a day school not far away. It was autumn. On windy days when I was walking to school each tree at the roadside stood in its own gold shower. I played a game catching the leaves as they fell. Whenever I caught a specially fine one I put it into my pocket. But next time I looked at it the colours had always faded and I was left with only a crumpled dead thing to throw away.
To begin with, I was quite glad to be going to school. I thought it might be something new and exciting. But it was not exciting, and soon it stopped being even new, and became disappointing and dull. There was a play at the end of term and I had a good part in it. I thought it would be a real excitement to act in a play. But when the day came that was somehow disappointing as well.
After that everything that happened at school seemed unreal and a waste of time, a part of the dull day world which was unimportant. Without understanding the reason, I knew that I had to keep the day unimportant. I had to prevent the day world from becoming real. I waited all through the day for the moment of going home to my night world, the reality which I lived in the secret life of the house.
IT’S A BEAUTIFUL spring morning somewhere in the South. This is a country which later in the year will be burnt brown and harsh, but now its first ardent response to the sun has flushed it with tender radiance. Soft sienna villages crown the hills, and in every village the church bells are ringing. The notes of the different bells drift and flutter and mingle as if flocks of pigeons with singing reeds in their wings were wheeling between the hills. From all the villages streams of gaily dressed peasants are setting out for the town. Some ride, some travel in carts pulled by lumbering flower-decked oxen, most of all are on foot. They pass through olive groves where the scarlet tulips wave wild silken flags in the thin grass. Like rim the vines brandish new fistfuls of vivid green. The whole landscape rejoices, the carnival notes of the bells swoop festively through the brilliant air. The peasants are full of holiday gaiety; it is a celebration for them, a great day. They go along laughing and calling to one another and singing to the music of their simple flutes and guitars
towards the town where the great day has also dawned. By contrast with the traditional idyllic country scene everything here has a somewhat ominous look. Views, sliding into each other, of the streets and squares of this town; a medium-sized southern town. Sunshine illuminates it hard as floodlighting. The streets, hung with garlands and bunting and unintelligibly sloganed banners, are all deserted. The main street slopes from a large public building with marble steps and balustrade down to a frontage on a glass lake. The lake frontage is planted with flowering magnolias. The boughs of the trees are black, stiff and shiny as if cut in patent leather, the flowers dangerously white and upspringing. (Do they recall to the dreamer another dream?)
From every doorway people can now be seen pouring into the streets: they come in a steadily advancing spate, filling all available space and still pouring on. There is a confused throbbing, trampling noise while they are on the move which, as the leading ranks consolidate into a dense crowd in front of the public building, becomes shot through with conflicting march tunes, bursts of clapping, singing, cheers; also with boos and shouts; with sharp distant stabs of shots, breaking glass, screams. The latter sounds are barely audible in the centre of the crowd where enthusiasm is solid.
Certainly the princess doesn’t hear them, she hears nothing but cheering voices, as she appears in her crown and state robes at the top of the steps. While she is standing there bowing, a glimpse through a broken window of soldiers entering a room where a man sits reading, paying no attention to what’s happening outside. Brief fragmentary flashes of smashed spectacles falling; arm-banded arms wrenching and grinding together thin shirt-sleeved arms;raised rifle-butt; open book on the floor, pages tom and defaced by huge muddy heel-mark. Then the man hanging slack between arm-grips, heaved through a door, slung into the crowd; shirt tom, tie twisted off, blood pouring down his face under limp lock of hair. The people against whom he falls pay no attention, their faces are not seen, they are just trousered or skirted bodies, some with worker’s hobnailed boots, some with two-toned suède shoes or natty brogues or patents, some with tennis shoes, pumps, sandals or high-heeled slippers, which automatically trample him as he folds up between them.
The princess does not see this episode (indeed, it hardly lasts as long as a flash of lightning), she is looking in another direction. She is watching a group of villagers, late arrivals from the country, who are hurrying along the now empty waterfront towards the streets lined with soldiers where the crowds are collected. In their eagerness not to miss anything the peasants are almost running: yet they can’t help stopping occasionally to admire the wonders of the town with faces of childish and delighted amazement.
Now that the child idea has been introduced it suddenly becomes apparent that they are children, the soldiers are children, the crowds are composed of children, the princess is a schoolgirl in a cardboard crown covered with gold paper.
She stands on the steps, smiling, enjoying to the utmost the acclamation of shrill childish cheers. But only for a moment. Her triumphantly straying eyes are quickly caught by an isolated moving shape, invisible to those facing her, the back view of a familiar dark-wrapped figure walking across the now vacant waterfront and rapidly passing out of sight between the magnolias. Deep in the girl’s brain the conflict at once beginning shows in the swift movements of her eyes, back and forth, from the black-branched distant trees to the close shouting faces.
Almost simultaneously with the start of the struggle it’s over, her crown tumbles off as she runs down the steps, sheers through the crowd of children, some of whom immediately start scuffling over the crown, which is soon tom and trodden to pieces between them.
AT the boarding-school I went to when I was older I felt unhappy, although to begin with I didn’t know this. The place was ugly outside and inside. The rooms were noisy and cold and crowded and I was alone in them. Of course, I always had been alone, but this was different. I was alone now in a bad way, alone in a crowded ugliness without respite. There was always winter framed in the frozen windows. The winter light marched along barren hilltops. The metal trees could never have sprouted leaves.
I began remembering things that were far away and forgotten: the way the sun shone in another country. One day when I combed my hair in front of a mirror, my mother looked out at me with her face of an exiled princess. That was the day I knew I was unhappy.
ONA LARGE bare round table in vacuum a double-page photographic montage is outspread: the same sort of layout as in an illustrated weekly but scaled up to three or four times the size. Detail of plain white clock-face marking seven-thirty. Jigsaw of school buildings angled in light and shade to sharp abstract design. Very chaotic detail of cloakroom with hockey boots scattered in pure disorder: rows of basins patterned with dirty hand marks, odd ends of grimy soap-cakes; a tap left running, forcing a costive passage through half-choked plug-hole; sodden stained towel twisted and pulled to the extreme end of its roller.
Views of classrooms, high-windowed, impersonal: straight plain functional furniture; everything unnecessarily bleak, comfortless, un-aesthetic: battered textbooks, atlases, volumes of standard works—some upside down—overflowing from shelves, upon which such things as broken chalks, paint-boxes, indian clubs, dumb-bells, skipping ropes, are stacked too in hopelessly overcrowded confusion. Very close detail of grey mottled inkwell with viscous slime of congealed ink dregs coating the bottom. Beside it, on a shallowly grooved wooden desktop, two pens, one with glossy new relief nib and tapered blue holder which terminates in a small heart made of lapis lazuli; the other with wooden holder, splintered and much chewed, nib crossed and encrusted with dried ink.
A funereal black overmantel supporting two bronze rearing horses stiffly tugged at by muscular half-nudes.
Long di
Detail of a tall highly polished silver cup on its black stand, and of other shapes and sizes of trophies in various positions. Crossed and tangled in a spillikin pile, skates, hockey sticks, tennis rackets (with and without presses), cricket bats. A football-sized ball is shown just about to drop through a circular piece of netting projecting from a goal-post against a sky across which birds are flying. An expanse of grass, very short, flat and arid, girls in tunics and white blouses caught by their shadows in arrested momentum. Girls’ arms, legs, torsos, in gymnastic poses with ropes, rings, clubs, parallel bars. Girls grouped formally on a stage. Girls’ hands warming on the coils of radiators.
An isolated radiator, too narrow for its height and by suggestion inadequate, under a curtained window at night; the parsimonious curtains leave a four-inch gap through which a small moon quizzes coldly. Other curtains in dormitories hanging like corrugated fences white in strong moonlight or clumsily bunched behind iron bedrails. Cupboards crowded with identical garments, in drawers, on shelves, on hooks and hangers. Repetitive framed photos of parents on shared dressing-tables. Close-ups of some of these. They are all photographs of the same two people taken in different poses; a stereotyped rather sweet insipid woman’s face, slightly faded, with much fluffy hair; a typical pukka could-be-military Britisher vacuously and complacently staring. Beds, or maybe it’s one single bed with white honeycomb spread, reflected in mirrors ad infinitum.