Ice - Anna Kavan [9]
On a winter day she was in the studio, posing for him in the nude, her arms raised in a graceful position. To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; until I saw the cords attached to her wrists and ankles. The room was cold. There was thick frost on the window panes and snow piled up on the sill outside. He wore the long uniform coat. She was shivering. When she asked, 'May I have a rest?' her voice had a pathetic tremor. He frowned, looked at his watch before he put down his palette. 'All right. That'll do for now. You can dress.' He untied her. The cords had left deep red angry rings on the white flesh. Her movements were slow and clumsy from cold, she fumbled awkwardly with buttons, suspenders. This seemed to annoy him. He turned away from her sharply, his face irritable. She kept glancing nervously at him, her mouth was unsteady, her hands would not stop shaking.
Another time the two were together in a cold room. As usual, he wore the long coat. It was night, freezing hard. He had a book in his hand, she was doing nothing. She looked cold and miserable, huddled up in a thick grey loden coat with a red and blue check lining. The room was silent and full of tension. It could be felt that neither of them had spoken for a long time. Outside the window, a twig snapped in the iron frost with a sound like a handclap. He dropped the book and got up to put on a record. Instantly she began to protest. 'Oh, no! Not that awful singing, for heaven's sake!' He ignored her, went on with what he was doing. The turntable started revolving. It was a record I had given them from my tape recording of the lemurs' song. To me, the extraordinary jungle music was lovely, mysterious, magical. To her it was a sort of torture, apparently. She covered her ears with her hands, winced at the high notes, looked more and more distraught. When the record ended and he re-started it without a moment's pause, she cried out as if he had struck her, 'No! I won't listen to it all over again!' threw herself at the mechanism, stopped it so abruptly that the voices expired in uncanny wailing. He faced her angrily. 'What the hell do you think you're doing? Have you gone off your head?' 'You know I can't stand that horrible record.' She seemed almost beside herself. 'You only play it because I hate it so much. . .' Tears sprang unchecked from her eyes, she brushed them away carelessly with her hand.
He glared at her, said: 'Why should I sit in silence for hours just because you don't choose to open your mouth?' His angry voice was full of indignant resentment. 'What's wrong with you, anyhow, these days? Why can't you behave like a normal being?' She did not answer, dropped her face in her hands. Tears dripped between her fingers. He gazed at her with a disgusted expression. 'I might as well be in solitary confinement as alone with you here. But I warn you I'm not going to put up with it much longer. I've had enough. I'm sick and tired of the way you're carrying on. Pull yourself together, or else—' With a threatening scowl, he went out, banging the door behind him. A silence followed, while she stood like a lost child, tears wet on her cheeks. Next she started wandering aimlessly round the room, stopped by the window, pulled the curtain aside, then cried out in amazement.
Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped