I Am Lazarus (Peter Owen Modern Classic) (10 page)

… ‘in a culture which is completely disordered, prince and servant are enemies, old age and youth kill eachother, father and son bear cold hearts, brothers accuse eachother, the most intimate friends work against eachother, man and wife deceive eachother, … day after day the danger increases … the bonds of society are loosened … the spirit becomes bestial … the greed for gain grows … duty and common sense arc forgotten. …

Clouds appear in the shape of dogs, horses, white swans and columns of carriages … Or they have the shape of a man in a blue garment and red head who does not move. His name is: the Heavenly Adversary … or they have the shape of a host of horses fighting: those are called the Slaying Horses … snakes crawl through the town from West to East … horses and cattle begin to talk, dogs and pigs mate, wolves come into the city. Men fall from the sky … When such signs appear in the land and its master does not better his ways in his fear, God shall send misfortune, sorrow and plague … all kinds of death, annihilation, earthquake, destruction and grief shall arrive … all this is caused by disorder in the state. …’

LIE BU WE
– about 300
B.C.

W
HY
did he leave me, I wonder? It seems almost incredible that less than a week has passed – only a few days, in fact – since I was preparing an evening meal for us both in this very room. How happy we were that evening. Or perhaps I ought to say, How happy I was: for events have turned out so differently from my expectations that I feel more than ever astray in the world, as though all my life I had been working along lines that had no relation at all to reality. When appearances prove so deceptive, one's own sensations are all that one really has to rely on; and I can say, at least, without any doubt, that I was extremely happy that evening.

It was, perhaps, the second or third meal we had eaten together
in the little house; the house to which I had moved on purpose to be in the same district of the city as this auburn stranger who had dropped into my life as if from the clouds, bringing with him a happiness I had not expected to feel again.

It seemed such a gay little house then, with its yellow shutters, its steep ladder-like flight of stairs, and its small, oddly-shaped rooms, each one painted a different colour. There was the living room all pale green like the springtime trees beneath which we walked every day after my work was finished; the bedroom coloured like almond blossom; the kitchen blue and white like one of those plates on which one traced as a child endless magic journeys.

I see that I have written in the past tense as if these rooms I'm describing no longer existed: and yet here I am, in that same blue and white kitchen where I was so happily preparing our meal that evening only the other day, when he said to me casually: ‘Some time you will write about this because all that is beautiful must triumph for all.’

And I answered (I remember that I was taking an earthenware dish out of the oven at the moment and thinking more about that than about what I was saying), I answered: ‘Yes, when it is all over between us, then I suppose I shall write down what I remember because nothing else of you will be left to me.’

The outward aspect of the house is still precisely the same as it was when those words were spoken. The paint is still fresh on the walls, the yellow shutters still present a frivolous brightness to the passers-by. It is only the character of the place which in this short time has become altogether different. Its personality has changed. It is not gay any longer. Oh, no, certainly gaiety has no connection whatever with these coloured walls which surround me with their implacable reminder of lost joy. Outer appearances remain unaltered, but the spirit which inspired every form with meaning has vanished, leaving only a shell behind.

When I look round at my few possessions, each one of which carries inextricably in its essence some amusing or tender association, I feel as though I were confronting a dear relative, perhaps a
brother, whose brain a sudden tragedy had unhinged. Everything is the same; the features, the figure, the hair: only the one vital element is missing without which the human being has no significance, no entity, no individual soul.

I have never heard of anybody who loved a mad person. I should think it would be impossible to do so. Pity or aversion one would feel, but not love. And the feelings I have for this house are a blend of aversion and pity, exactly as they would be for someone very close to me whose personality had deteriorated until there finally remained no more possibility whatever of contact between us.

Sometimes it is almost horror that comes over me at the sight of these rooms, these objects, for which the whole
raison d
’ê
tre
, as it were, has been taken away. Why do these walls still stand? When every day and night, all over the city, buildings are being struck down, why does this house remain intact? How can it so obstinately fail to disintegrate, seeing that it no longer has any chance of fulfilling the purpose for which I first decided to occupy it?

Yes, it's just as if one were forced to live with someone out of his mind, or, worse still, with the actual physical corpse of a loved person which a diabolical chemistry had rendered immune from the process of dissolution.

The words with which I began writing, the words, ‘Why did he leave me?’ keep recurring to me although I try to drive them away. What's the use of tormenting myself with speculations about this man, dressed always in blue, whose arrival I did not witness and who departed in silence and unobserved? It is only necessary for me to know that he has gone, that he is far away, and that he will not return. Suddenly he left me, without warning or explanation, without saying good-bye. If I had known his intention that evening, could I have said or done anything to influence his decision? That is a question I often vainly consider, alone in these rooms which now have no meaning for me.

And why indeed should one expect to find a meaning in walls, in windows, or in a book that is not to be found on the shelf? In a city where everything is chaotic and inexplicable and where one is constantly beset by all kinds of death, annihilation, destruction
and grief it is something, at all events, to be able to say: ‘On that evening’, or ‘On such and such a day, I was happy’.

I've tried hard to solve the bitter riddle which brought me across the world to this place of misfortune when all I wished was freedom to live in peace, in sunshine, in a country where birds had not learnt to fly in terror from the sound of a falling bomb. Lately I've been thinking that possibly all these happenings are bound up together. That perhaps the man in the blue suit with whom I was happy, the man who left me so abruptly and, as it superficially appears, so unkindly, perhaps he was, in some obscure way, connected with my sentence; or even came with the express purpose of putting into my hands a clue which, if properly followed, would finally lead to the truth and make clear the justice of all these catastrophes which have fallen upon me.

How otherwise than as an unfulfilled obligation, and therefore as an indictment, can I translate that phrase of his, which at the time passed almost unnoticed, but which now seems to me to be the crux of the whole matter: ‘All that is beautiful must triumph for all’?

THE BROTHER

Now that those days are as dead as the grave and I have so much time on my hands I feel a great and persistent need to record something of the relationship between myself and my brother. And the fact that I'm allowed to do so (indeed, I'm even encouraged to write by the provision of pencils and, in spite of the paper shortage, of plenty of cheap foolscap paper) makes me believe that perhaps those better able to judge than I have discerned in the long, submerged struggle between the two of us an example which may prove valuable to other people in the same sort of unfortunate circumstances.

There's plenty of time now to think back. Plenty of time to remember, to contemplate, to reflect on the disconnected, small, distant pictures which go to compose the whole gloomy canvas.

Sitting here in this lonely little room, without friends, without a future, without even a dream; sitting here hour after hour, listening to the sea's curious muffled bass which incorporates at irregular intervals a voice-like contralto pleading, I've arrived at certain decisions. I've decided to make a kind of precis, not a detailed analysis because that's beyond my powers, but a brief sketch of the pattern which my brother and I traced out in our mutual reactions. I'm not doing this in the hope of any amelioration of my own position (that I fully realize is out of the question and I don't even desire it); nor because I am inspired by an altruistic wish for others to profit by my misfortune; but simply because I want to get things clear in my own mind, and the best way to get things clear is to get them all written down.

To begin at the very beginning: I am the elder brother by two years. My birthday is in the spring, under the sign of Mars, and on that day, while I was at home, I was always accustomed to see my mother fill the vases with tulips like stiff fairy lights.

My brother was born in the dead of winter. I remember my mother telling us about the exceptional severity of that winter and
how the fountain in the square opposite our home spouted glittering sprays of ice instead of water, and the sparrows were found in dozens frozen to death. I remember particularly how she told us that somebody (I think it was one of the doctors at the hospital where she was confined), suddenly opening a door into the street, felt something crunch under his boot and discovered a little pile of dead birds which must have fluttered into the doorway for shelter before they became numbed.

The thought of those small, crushed, rigid bodies, which I picture as finches, is associated with early memories of my brother.

My brother. Ah, now I really grasp the difficulty of what I have undertaken. When it comes to the point of describing him my thoughts falter and turn aside. It's not that I don't remember him clearly, so much too clearly. But the act of concentration is like something unlawful. It's as if I were profanely trying to exhume his actual buried corpse. It's as if my brain cells themselves rejected a forbidden task. I begin to hesitate; I find myself listening attentively to the sea as if those never quite audible voices out there might be about to give me a message. But however closely I pay attention to the sea noise I can't distinguish anything definite: only the subdued, interminable clamour which now sounds to me like a high wind in the trees near the house where we used to live.

My brother. Slowly, slowly, his likeness comes in front of my eyes. Yet it isn't a distinct image of him even now. It isn't one picture so much as a series of pictures, taken at different ages and in different places, dissolving into one another and correspondingly vague. A white skin, red cheeks, chestnut hair. His skin was so white that you might have thought it a gift from the ice flowers on the window that witnessed his birth. People used to tease him by saying that such a beautiful white skin was wasted on a boy and should have belonged to a girl. He was big and strong though, not in the least girlish, and that was the reason, I suppose, that he didn't mind the teasing; that, and the gay, good-natured way that he had. It's his hair that I can remember most clearly; a wonderful head of rich red-brown curls with a lovely golden sheen, as glossy and fine as silk. If I'd been a girl I think I would have loved to run my
fingers through his hair and unwind the curls which would, I'm sure, have briskly sprung back as soon as I let them go. I never did touch my brother's hair: and somehow this seems a sad thing to me. I think I could bear remembrance more easily if, even if only once, I had put my hand on his head.

My mother sometimes used to caress him in this way; but not frequently: not, at any rate, when I was present. Sometimes when we were all together in the evening I would notice her eyes turning fondly to his head bowed over a book. And I had the impression that she would have reached out to stroke his hair which shone so handsomely under the lamp if she had not been afraid of making me jealous or of hurting my feelings.

Poor mother. How she must have regretted the difference between her two sons. Even in the circumstances of our births we were totally different, and all her suffering and anxiety were on my account.

My brother came into the world easily in the glow of a frosty sunrise. From babyhood he was healthy and lovable and never caused a moment's alarm. Whereas I, dragged bloodily through a long and difficult birth, for years swung between life and death, the victim of an endless sequence of illnesses and accidents. All through my unlucky childhood my hold on life was precarious, and it was not until I was fully grown that my body appeared to reconcile itself more or less to the earth.

I have read the psychologists’ theory that children bom in springtime are liable to a lack of robustness because of the tension accumulating in the natural world during their term of embryonic development. But at the time when I was growing up children bom in spring and summer were generally supposed to possess the pleasant characteristics of those seasons. Friends used to express surprise that I, with my auspicious birthday, was continually ailing, while my brother, who should have been handicapped by his freezing introduction to life, was a perfect model of mental and physical health.

Naturally, I could not fail to be aware of the comparisons which were made between the two of us, of course always in my disfavour.
My brother was tail, well-developed and fine to look at with his vivid colouring; kind, friendly, intelligent. I was puny, weak, incapable of tying my own shoelace without gasping for breath, my complexion was sallow, my hair stringy and dull, my manner lifeless or boorish and petulant.

When my brother brought friends to the house I would hide unsociably in my room. Or, worse, I would sit among them like a malicious goblin, damping their high spirits with my sneers and silences and bitter remarks.

In this way, as time went on, a gradual alienation took place for which I was entirely to blame. Up to the very end my brother was always considerate, gentle, eager to make friends with me. My heart sinks with shame and remorse now when I remember how often when he came back from his work in the business part of the town he would sit at home, trying to coax me into a good mood with his amusing talk, instead of spending the evening with his companions. How patient he was, and how little response he got from me. As likely as not I would try to pick a quarrel with him for his pains. But he would never be goaded into hostility, and if he saw that I was determined to stick to my bad temper, he would simply sigh and go out of the room; not reproachfully, but with such a sad, disappointed look that my heart almost breaks when I recall it.