Ice - Anna Kavan [67]
She lay silent, unmoving, avoiding me by turning her face to the wall. Perhaps because I could not see her face, she seemed like someone I did not know. I felt nothing whatever about her, all feeling had left me. I had said I could not stand any more, and that was the truth. I could not go on; it was all too humiliating, too painful. I had wanted to finish with her in the past, but had been unable to do so. Now the moment had come. It was time to get up and go, to end the whole wretched business. I had let it go on far too long, it had always been painful and unrewarding. She did not move when I stood up. Neither of us said a word. We were like two strangers accidentally in the same room. I was not thinking. All I wanted was to get into the car and drive and drive, until I was somewhere far away where I could forget all this. I left the room without looking at her or speaking, and went out into the arctic cold.
Outside it had got quite dark. I paused on the verandah for my eyes to get used to the blackness. By degrees the snow became visible as it fell, a sort of faint shimmer like phosphorescence. The hollow roar of the wind came in irregular bursts, the snowflakes whirled madly in all directions, filled the night with their spectral chaos. I seemed to feel the same feverish disorder in myself, in all my pointless rushing from place to place. The crazily dancing snowflakes represented the whole of life. Her image flew past, the silver hair streaming and was instantly swept away in the wild confusion. In the delirium of the dance, it was impossible to distinguish between the violent and the victims. Anyway, distinctions no longer mattered in a dance of death, where all the dancers spun on the edge of nothing.
I had grown used to the feeling that I was going towards execution. It was something in the distance, an idea with which I had become familiar. Now it suddenly sprang at me, stood close at my elbow, no longer an idea, but a reality, just about to happen. It gave me a shock, a physical sensation in the pit of the stomach. The past had vanished and become nothing; the future was the inconceivable nothingness of annihilation. All that was left was the ceaselessly shrinking fragment of time called 'now'.
I remembered the dark blue sky of noon and midnight which I had seen above, while below a wall of rainbow ice moved over the ocean, around the globe. Pale cliffs looming, radiating dead cold, ghostly avengers coming to end mankind. I knew the ice was closing in round us, my own eyes had seen the ominous moving wall. I knew it was coming closer each moment, and would go on advancing until all life was extinct.
I thought of the girl I had left in the room behind me, a child, immature, a glass girl. She had not seen, did not understand. She knew she was doomed, but not the nature of her fate, or how to face it. No one