I Am Lazarus (Peter Owen Modern Classic) (21 page)

He stood fingering the ends of the bow delicately for a moment, smiling at me in a way that was both absent-minded and polite, before he invited me to sit down. I took the chair that he indicated and began to explain my case. The room was quite small and square, with green walls. Outside the window, almost touching the glass, was a large tree, still covered, in spite of the lateness of the season, with trembling green leaves. As the leaves stirred, watery shadows wavered over the ceiling and walls, so that one had the impression of being enclosed in a tank.

I felt singularly uncomfortable. My case was difficult to describe. I did not know where to start, or which particulars to relate, which to omit, since it was clearly impossible to mention every detail of the enormously protracted and complex business.

The young foreigner sat listening to me without making a single note. His manner was perfectly correct, but I somehow had the
impression that he was not fully attentive. I wondered how much he understood of what I was saying: it was clear to me from the few words he had spoken that his grasp of the language was far from perfect. And why did he not write down at least some of the salient points of my statement? He surely didn't propose to rely purely on memory in such a complicated affair? Now and then he fingered the wings of his tie and smiled absently; but whether at me or at his own thoughts there was no way of knowing.

The situation suddenly appeared heartbreaking, futile, and I felt on the verge of tears. What was I doing here in this tank-like room, relating my private and piercing griefs to a smiling stranger who spoke in a different tongue? I thought I should stand up and go away, but I heard myself talking in agitation, begging him to realize the extreme gravity of my predicament and to give it more serious consideration, seeing that he was my last available source of assistance.

The young advisor smiled at me politely and made some vague fluttering movements with his small hands, at the same time saying a few words to the effect that my case was not really so exceptional as I thought; that it was, in fact, quite a common one. I protested that he must be mistaken, perhaps had not understood me completely. He smiled again, and repeated those indeterminate motions which possibly were intended to be reassuring but which only conveyed to me a distrustful sense of misapprehension. Then he glanced at his watch in a way that was meant to signify the end of the interview, and instructed me to come back again in two or three days.

I don't remember how I got out of the building: I've no recollection of passing between the coils of barbed wire in the alley. The sun was setting and I was in a residential part of the city that was strange to me; I walked up long, hilly, deserted streets between large houses, most of which seemed to be uninhabited. Dry autumnal weeds grew tall in the gardens, and the black window holes gaped with jagged fringes like mirror fragments in which the last rays of the sun stared at themselves bitterly. Then I passed a stranger who glanced coldly at me, and other strangers passed by
with cold faces, and still other strangers. Armoured vehicles, eccentrically coloured, stood in an endless chain at the roadside, painted with cabalistic signs. But what these symbols meant I had no idea-. I had no idea if there were a place anywhere to which I could go to escape from the strangeness, or what I could do to bear being a stranger in our strange city, or whether I should ever visit that stranger who was my advisor again.

By the same author

Asylum Piece

A Charmed Circle

Guilty

Ice

Mercury

The Parson

A Scarcity of Love

Sleep Has His House

A Stranger Still

Who Are You?

PETER OWEN PUBLISHERS

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Peter Owen books are distributed in the USA and Canada by Independent Publishers Group/Trafalgar Square 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, IL 60610, USA

© Anna Kavan 1945

© Rhys Davies and R.B. Marriott 1978

Foreword © Victoria Walker 2013

First published in Great Britain 1945

First Peter Owen Modern Classic edition 2013

This ebook edition 2013

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publishers.

PAPERBACK ISBN 978-0-7206-1493-0

EPUB ISBN 978-0-7206-1530-2

KINDLE ISBN 978-0-7206-1531-9

PDF ISBN 978-0-7206-1532-6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Also published by Peter Owen

ICE

Anna Kavan

978-0-7206-1268-4 • 158 pp • £9.95 / / EPUB 978-0-7206-1415-2

KINDLE 978-0-7206-1416-9 / PDF 978-0-7206-1417-6

Peter Owen Modern Classic

–
Times Literary Supplement

‘One can only admire the strength and courage of this visionary.’ –
The Times

‘Few contemporary novelists could match the intensity of her vision.’ – J.G. Ballard

In this haunting and surreal novel, the narrator and a man known as ‘the warden’ search for an elusive girl in a frozen, seemingly post-nuclear, apocalyptic landscape. The country has been invaded and is being governed by a secret organization. There is destruction everywhere; great walls of ice overrun the world. Together with the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory quest for this strange and fragile creature with albino hair. Acclaimed by Brian Aldiss on its publication in 1967 as the best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary and innovative novel has subsequently been recognized as a major work of literature in any genre.

‘There is nothing else like it … This
Ice
is not psychological ice or metaphysical ice; here the loneliness of childhood has been magicked into a physical reality as hallucinatory as the Ancient Mariner's.’ – Doris Lessing

Also published by Peter Owen

GUILTY

Anna Kavan

PB 978-0-7206-1268-4 • 158 pp • £9.95 / EPUB 978-0-7206-1441-1

KINDLE 978-0-7206-1442-8 / PDF 978-0-7206-1443-5

Not published until forty years after Anna Kavan's death,
Guilty
, narrated by Mark, is set in an unspecified but eerily familiar time and landscape. He begins the novel as a young boy whose father has just returned from war. In spite of being garlanded as a hero, Mark's father declares himself a pacifist and is immediately reviled in a country still suffering from the divisions of conflict. When his father is forced into exile Mark meets Mr Spector, a shady figure who from then on is a dominant force in Mark's life, seeing him through his schooling, employment and even finding him accommodation. When Mark tries to break away from Mr Spector to pursue an engagement with the beautiful but docile Carla his life begins to unravel. Thwarted at every turn by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy he begins to fall prey to the machinations and insecurities of his guilt-ridden mind. Drawing on many of Kavan's familiar themes,
Guilty
will be welcomed by those who already know Kavan's work and a revelation to those who don't.