Read Online I Am Lazarus (Peter Owen Modern Classic) by Anna Kavan - Free Book Online Page B

itself with no god or external sanity intervening. Well, let them get on with it. Let it be over soon. She was very tired of the war-world and only wanted everything to be over. It seemed not to matter any more what happened. There had been far too much happen already. Queer how tired apprehending a war made you. The war had always been there in the different countries, but it had taken London to bring her the apprehension of war. This can't go on, she thought sometimes, waking suddenly in the night or moving about a room: this can not go on. But it went on and on and she went on somehow, only feeling always more and more tired. She thought a little about how tired she was.
    Walking along the platform, keeping pace with Ken who walked slowly now, the woolgathering took possession of her and all the way up in the lift she was dreaming the double stream of destruction, feeling the composite entity of the bomber-streams, gigantic cruising serpents of metal horror circling and smashing the world.
    Guns were firing and searchlights were setting their geometrical snares when they came out of the station. The searchlights had not caught anything. They closed and opened and closed and drew blank again.
    ‘Hadn't we better wait a bit?’ Ken said.
    ‘It's only a minute from here and there doesn't seem to be any shrapnel,’ she answered, not quite out of the woolgathering.
    She started along the pavement in black shadow. There would be moonligh t on that side of the street when they turned the corner. The moon was just past the full. It was under this moon that, walking home by herself, she had seen the morepork perched on the roof and calling its ominous cry. The budgerigars in their cage twittered with fright. No, that was somewhere else. Where was that? Her eyes refusing the lighted sky she was not sure what part of her life she was in; and then she was back from wherever it was to the war and the war-locked town.
    The gunfire died down briefly and a plane began making its familiar maddening, hysterical, unescapable sound. She did not notice at first that Ken had stopped walking beside her. Then the noise of the plane got louder and she remembered about him and he was not there and that startled her and the night seemed unreal. Looking back then, she could see a darker bulk against the dark wall of a house, and she got the torch out of her bag and flashed it and saw his face lifted and turned to the sky. The light fell full on his face and she looked once and switched off the torch quickly and went to him and said, ‘Ken’. But the guns started again and he did not look at her but moved away fast, looking up, back towards the tube station, the way they had just come.
    She called, ‘Ken, Ken’. And then, not knowing where the words came from or thinking them even, ‘Oh, no, no. Oh, please no. Oh, Ken’.
    There was no answer, it was hard to hear anything in the barrage, but she heard footsteps running.
    In the sky, the laborious searchlights exultantly caught and clamped a desperate plunging speck in their trap. But she did not see it because quite suddenly her eyes were too full of tears.

FACE OF MY PEOPLE
     
    B EFORE they took over the big house and turned it into a psychiatric hospital the room must have been somebody's boudoir. It was upstairs, quite a small room, with a painted ceiling of cupids and flowers and doves, the walls divided by plaster mouldings to simulate pillars and wreaths, and the panels between the mouldings sky blue. It was a frivolous little room. The name Dr. Pope looked like a mistake on the door and so did the furniture which was not at all frivolous but ugly and utilitarian, the big office desk, the rather ominous high, hard thing that was neither a bed nor a couch.
    Dr. Pope did not look at all frivolous either. He was about forty, tall, straight, muscular, with a large, impersonal, hairless, tidy face, rather alarmingly alert and determined looking. He did not look in the least like a holy