Machines in the Head Page 4

  ‘How do you know who I am?’ I asked in amazement. I was positive that I had never seen him before, yet how could I be quite certain? His was one of those undistinguished faces which one might see many times without remembering it.

  In reply, he began to reel off quite a long speech, but all so fast and in such a low voice that I could only catch a word here and there and these did not make sense. Totally unable to follow what he was saying, I only vaguely got the impression that he was asking me to accompany him somewhere. Suddenly I saw that the suitcase standing on the floor near his feet was my own.

  ‘What are you doing with my bag? How did you get it . . . ? The attendant had no right to let you take it out of the cloakroom,’ I said angrily, stretching down for the handle. But before I could reach it he picked up the bag himself with a deprecating smile and carried it out of the door.

  I followed him, full of indignation and eager to reclaim my property. In the street, pedestrians came between us, and I was unable to catch up with him until he had turned the corner into a narrow alley full of parked cars. It occurred to me that the man was out of his mind. I couldn’t believe he intended to steal the suitcase; he looked far too respectable for that.

  ‘What’s the meaning of all this? Where are you taking my bag?’ I said, catching hold of his sleeve. We were just beside a large black limousine which stood in the rank of waiting cars. My companion rested the bag on the running board.

  ‘I see that you haven’t understood me,’ he said; and now, for the first time, he spoke clearly so that I could really hear what he was saying. ‘Here is my authorization. It was merely out of consideration for you that I refrained from producing it inside where everyone would have seen it.’ He took a pale-blue form out of his pocket and held it towards me. But in the uncertain cross-light from the street lamps and the cars I only had time to make out some unintelligible legal phrases, and my own name embellished with elaborate scrolls and flourishes in the old-fashioned style, before he hastily put the stiff paper away again.

  I was opening my mouth to ask him to let me look at it properly, when the chauffeur of the black car suddenly climbed out of the driving seat and picked up my case with the clear intention of putting it inside the vehicle.

  ‘That belongs to me. Kindly leave it alone!’ I commanded, at the same time wondering what I should do if the man refused to obey my order. But, as if the whole matter were of perfect indifference to him, he at once let go the handle and returned to his seat where he immediately appeared to become absorbed in an evening newspaper.

  Now for the first time I observed the official coat of arms emblazoned on the glossy black door panel of the car, and I saw, too, that the windows were made of frosted glass. And for the first time I was aware of a faint anxiety, not because I thought for an instant that the situation was serious but because I had always heard what a tedious, interminable business it was to extricate oneself from official red tape once one had become even remotely involved with it.

  Feeling that there was not a moment to be lost, that I must make my explanations and escape before I became any further entangled in this ridiculous mesh of misunderstanding, I began to talk to the elderly man who was standing patiently beside me. I spoke quietly and in a reasonable tone, telling him that I was not blaming him in the least but that a mistake had certainly been made; I was not the person mentioned on the document he had shown me, which probably referred to somebody of the same name. After all, my name was not an uncommon one; I could think of at least two people offhand – a film actress and a writer of short stories – who were called by it. When I had finished speaking I looked at him anxiously to see how he had taken my arguments. He appeared to be impressed, nodded his head once or twice in a reflective way, but made no reply. Encouraged by his attitude, I decided on a bold move, picked up my suitcase and walked rapidly back to the restaurant. He did not attempt to stop me, nor, as far as I could see, was he following me, and I congratulated myself on having escaped so easily. It seemed as if boldness were what was most needed in dealing with officialdom.

  R was still sitting at the table where I had left him. My spirits had now risen high. I felt cheerful, lively and full of confidence as I sat down – bringing my bag with me this time – and related the peculiar incidents that had just taken place. I told the story quite well, smiling at the absurdity of it; I really think I made it sound very amusing. But when, at the end, I looked for R’s smile of appreciation, I was astonished to see that he remained grave. He did not look at me but sat with downcast eyes, drawing an invisible pattern on the cloth with his coffee spoon.

  ‘Well – don’t you think it was funny that they should make such a mistake?’ I asked, trying to force his amusement.

  Now indeed he looked up at me but with such a serious face and with eyes so troubled that all my assurance and good spirits suddenly evaporated into thin air. Just at that moment I noticed the ugly waiter hovering near, almost as if he were trying to overhear our conversation, and now a feeling of dread slowly distilled itself in my veins.

  ‘Why don’t you say something?’ I burst out in agitation as R still remained silent. ‘Surely it’s not possible that you think – that there was no mistake . . . ? That I am the person they really wanted?’

  My friend put down the spoon and laid his hand on my arm. The affectionate touch, so full of sympathy and compassion, demoralized me even more than his words.

  ‘I think if I were you,’ he said slowly and as if with difficulty, ‘I think I would go and find out just what the charge is against you. After all, you will easily be able to prove your identity if there has really been a mistake. It will only create a bad impression if you refuse to go.’

  Now that I have so much time on my hands in which to think over past events, I sometimes wonder whether R was right: whether I would not have done better to keep my freedom as long as possible and even at the risk of prejudicing the final outcome of the affair. But at the time I allowed him to persuade me. I have always had a high opinion of his judgement, and I accepted it then. I felt, too, that I should forfeit his respect if I evaded the issue. But when we went out into the hall and I saw the neat, inconspicuous man still impassively, impersonally waiting, I began to wonder, as I have wondered ever since, whether the good opinion of anybody in the whole world is worth all that I have had to suffer and must still go on suffering – for how long; oh, for how long?

  AT NIGHT

  HOW SLOWLY THE MINUTES pass in the winter night, and yet the hours themselves do not seem so long. Already the church clock is calling the hour again in its dull country voice that sounds half stupefied with the cold. I lie in bed, and like a well-drilled prisoner, an old-timer, I resign myself to the familiar pattern of sleeplessness. It is a routine I know only too well.

  My jailer is in the room with me, but he cannot accuse me of being rebellious or troublesome. I lie as still as if the bed were my coffin, not wishing to attract his attention. Perhaps if I don’t move for a whole hour he will let me sleep.

  Naturally, I cannot put on the light. The room is as dark as a box lined with black velvet that someone has dropped into a frozen well. Everything is quiet except when the house-bones creak in the frost or a lump of snow slides from the roof with a sound like a stealthy sigh. I open my eyes in the darkness. The eyelids feel stiff as if tears had congealed upon them in rime. If only I could see my jailer it would not be so bad. It would be a relief to know just where he is keeping watch. At first I fancy that he is standing like a dark curtain beside the door. The ceiling is lifted off the room as if it were the lid of a box, and he is towering up, taller than an elm tree, up towards the icy mountains of the moon. But then it seems to me that I have made a mistake and that he is crouching on the floor quite close to me.

  An iron band has been clamped around my head, and just at this moment the jailer strikes the cold metal a ringing blow which sends needles of pain into my eye sockets. He is showing his disapproval of my inquiring thoughts; or perha
ps he merely wishes to assert his authority over me. At any rate, I hastily shut my eyes again and lie motionless, hardly daring to breathe, under the bedclothes.

  To occupy my mind I begin to run through the formulae which the foreign doctor taught me when I first came under suspicion. I repeat to myself that there is no such person as a victim of sleeplessness, that I stay awake simply because I prefer to continue my thoughts. I try to imagine myself in the skin of a newborn infant, without future or past. If the jailer looks into my mind now, I think, he cannot raise any objection to what is going on there. The face of the Dutch doctor, thin and sharp and hard like the face of a sea captain, passes before me. Suddenly a cock crows near by with a sound fantastic, unearthly, in this world still locked in darkness and frost. The cock’s crow flowers sharply in three flaming points, a fiery fleur-de-lis blossoming momentaneously in the black field of night.

  Now I am almost on the point of falling asleep. My body feels limp; my thoughts start to run together. My thoughts have become strands of weed, of no special colour, slowly undulating in colourless water.

  My left hand twitches, and again I am wide awake. It is the striking of the church clock that has called me back to my jailer’s presence. Did I count five strokes or four? I am too tired to be certain. In any case, the night will be over soon. The iron band on my head has tightened and slipped down so that it presses against my eyeballs. And yet the pain does not seem so much to come from this cruel pressure as to emanate from somewhere inside my skull, from the brain cortex: it is the brain itself which is aching.

  All at once I feel desperate, outraged. Why am I alone doomed to spend nights of torment with an unseen jailer when all the rest of the world sleeps peacefully? By what laws have I been tried and condemned, without my knowledge, and to such a heavy sentence, too, when I do not even know of what or by whom I have been indicted? A wild impulse comes to me to protest, to demand a hearing, to refuse to submit any longer to such injustice.

  But to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one’s innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there’s no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame.

  MACHINES IN THE HEAD

  THERE IS SOME QUITE trivial, distant noise; a sound, moreover, which has nothing to do with me, to which there is not the slightest need for me to pay any attention, yet it suffices to wake me and in no gentle way, either, but savagely, violently, shockingly, like an air-raid alarm. The clock is just striking seven. I have been asleep perhaps one hour, perhaps two. Roused in this brutal fashion, I jump up just in time to catch a glimpse of the vanishing hem of sleep as, like a dark scarf maliciously snatched away, it glides over the foot of the bed and disappears in a flash under the closed door. Useless, quite futile, to dash after it in pursuit. I am awake now for good or, rather, for bad; the wheels, my masters, are already vibrating with incipient motion; the whole mechanism is preparing to begin the monotonous, hateful functioning of which I am the dispirited slave.

  ‘Stop! Wait a little – it’s so early – Give me a little respite!’ I cry, although I know it is quite in vain. ‘Only let me have a little more sleep – an hour – half an hour – that’s all I ask.’

  What’s the good of appealing to senseless machinery? The cogs are moving, the engines are slowly gathering momentum; a low humming noise is perceptible even now. How well I recognize every sound, every tremor of the laborious start. The loathsome familiarity of the routine is almost the worst part of it, intolerable and inescapable at the same time, like a sickness inside the blood. This morning it drives me to rebellion, to madness; I want to batter my head on the walls, to shatter my head with bullets, to beat the machines into pulp, into powder, along with my skull.

  ‘It’s horribly unjust!’ I hear myself calling out – to what, to whom, heaven alone knows. ‘One can’t work so many hours on so little sleep. Doesn’t anyone know or care that I’m dying here among all these levers and wheels? Can’t somebody save me? I haven’t really done anything wrong – I feel terribly ill – I can hardly open my eyes –’

  And it’s true that my head aches abominably, and I feel on the point of collapse.

  Suddenly I notice that the light which hurts my eyes so much comes from the sun. Yes, the sun is actually shining outside; instead of snow there is dew sparkling all over the grass, crocuses have spread their neat, low fire of symmetrical flames under the rose bushes. Winter has gone; it is spring. In astonishment I hurry to the window and look out. What has happened, then? I feel dazed, bewildered. Is it possible that I am still living in a world where the sun shines and flowers appear in the springtime? I thought I had been exiled from all that long ago. I rub my tired eyes; still there is sunlight, the rooks flap noisily about their nests in the old elms, and now I hear how sweetly the small birds are singing. But even as I stand there all these happy things start to recede, to become phantasmal, transparent as the texture of dream plasma, banished by the monstrous mechanical outlines of pulleys, wheels, shafts, which in their orderly, remorseless and too-well-known evolutions now with increasing insistence demand my attention.

  Like a fading mirage in the background I can still, straining my eyes, faintly discern the sunlit grass, the blue, blue arches of sky across which a green shape flies in remote parabola, the ghost of an emerald dagger spectrally flung.

  ‘Oh, stop – stop! Give me another minute – just a minute longer to see the green woodpecker!’ I implore, with my hands already, in automatic obedience, starting to perform their detested task.

  What does a machine care about green woodpeckers? The wheels revolve faster, the pistons slide smoothly in their cylinders, the noise of machinery fills the whole world. Long since cowed into slavish submission, I still draw from some inexorable source the strength to continue my hard labour, although I am scarcely able to stand on my feet.

  In a polished surface of metal I happen to notice my reflected face; it wears a pale, beaten, lonely look, eyes looking out at nothing with an expression of fear, frightened and lonely in a nightmare world. Some thing, I don’t know what, makes me think of my childhood; I remember myself as a schoolchild sitting at a hard wooden desk, and then as a little girl with thick, fair, wind-tossed hair feeding the swans in a park. And it seems both strange and sad to me that all those childish years were spent in preparation for this – that, forgotten by everybody, with a beaten face, I should serve machinery in a place far away from the sun.

  ASYLUM PIECE II

  I HAD A FRIEND, a lover. Or did I dream it? So many dreams are crowding upon me now that I can scarcely tell true from false: dreams like light imprisoned in bright mineral caves; hot, heavy dreams; iceage dreams; dreams like machines in the head. I lie between the bare wall and the medicine bitter with sediment in its dwarfish glass and try to recall my dream.

  I see myself walking hand in hand with another, a human being whose heart and mind had grown into mine. We walked together on many roads, in sunshine beside ancient olive trees, on hillsides sprayed as by fountains with the larks’ singing, in lanes where the raindrops dripped from the chilly leaves. Between us there was understanding without reservations and indestructible peace. I, who had been lonely and incomplete, was now fulfilled. Our thoughts ran together like greyhounds of equal swiftness. Perfection like music was in our united thoughts.

  I remember an inn in some southern country. A crisis, long since forgotten, had arisen in our lives. I remember only the cypresses’ black flames blowing, the sky hard as a blue plate, and my own confidence, serene, unshakeable, utterly secure. ‘Whatever happens is trivial so long as we are together. Under no circumstances could we fail one another, wound one another, do one another wrong.’

  Who shall describe the slow and lamentable cooling of the heart? On what day does one first observe the infinitesimal crack which finally becomes a chasm deeper than hel
l?

  The years passed like the steps of a staircase leading lower and lower. I did not walk any more in the sun or hear the songs of larks like crystal fountains playing against the sky. No hand enfolded mine in the warm clasp of love. My thoughts were again solitary, disintegrant, disharmonious – the music gone. I lived alone in a few pleasant rooms, feeling my life run out aimlessly with the tedious hours: the life of an old maid ran out of my fingertips. I arranged the flowers in their vases.

  Yet still, intermittently, I saw him, the companion whose heart and brain once seemed to have grown to mine. I saw him without seeing him, the same and yet not the same. Still I could not believe that everything was lost beyond hope of salvage. Still I believed that one day the world would change colour, a curtain would be ripped away, and all would be as it once was.

  But now I am lying in a lonely bed. I am weak and confused. My muscles do not obey me, my thoughts run erratically, as small animals do when they are cornered. I am forgotten and lost.

  It was he who brought me to this place. He took my hand. I almost heard the tearing of the curtain. For the first time in many months we rested together in peace.

  Then they told me that he had gone. For a long while I did not believe it. But time passes by, and no word comes. I cannot deceive myself any longer. He has gone, he has left me, and he will not return. I am alone for ever in this room where the light burns all night long, and the professional faces of strangers, without warmth or pity, glance at me through the half-open door. I wait, I wait, between the wall and the bitter medicine in the glass. What am I waiting for? A screen of wrought iron covers the window; the house door is locked, although the door of my room is open. All night long the light watches me with its unbiased eye. There are strange sounds in the night. I wait, I wait, perhaps for the dreams that come so close to me now.