When he had finished a girl with large eyes and shining youthful breasts, who was sitting in front of him, said:
‘My father is very old. He is ninety-four years of age and he is blind, deaf and bad-tempered and he spends most of his time in bed. We don’t have enough food for him and when we do give him food he complains and says that we are trying to poison him. We are very poor and don’t have much food for ourselves and what he eats is taking away from the younger ones. What does your mastership say?’
‘What is your name?’ Donald asked, as he watched the sunlight throb in her black hair.
‘Miraga.’
‘Well, Miraga,’ said the missionary turning his eyes away from her firm breasts, ‘God, as I said, does not want us to kill anyone, least of all our father whom we are told to respect. Respect thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long on the earth, that is what God says. I hope I will never hear you saying anything like that again. Are you listening to me?’
‘Yes,’ said Miraga, ‘but he is old and we have no food in the house. The children are hungry. I myself am hungry.’
‘There are things in the world more important than the body,’ said Donald. ‘The body passes but the soul remains.’ But when he looked around him he saw no white and fluttering soul, benign though faint, but only the shining black bodies and the green light on the windows. I am a bachelor, thought Donald despairingly, how much do I know about the world? Especially how much do I know about women? But then the thought, which did not seem blasphemous, occurred to him, that Christ was a bachelor also, though his father was a carpenter and not, like his own, a minister.
His father’s ferocious beard seemed to glare down at the girl’s naked breasts which seemed to tremble in front of his eyes. Miraga Miraga Miraga. The name brought to his mind water and daybreak and sun on tranquil rivers.
‘Does anyone else have a question?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said a big slow man who clutched the seat in front of him as he stood up. ‘My name is Horruga. We hear in the Bible the story of how Peter cut off the ear of a soldier. What was the reason for that?’
‘He had no right to do that,’ said Donald briskly. ‘Christ himself reminded him that he had sinned. Surely my predecessor told you that.’ When he mentioned his predecessor they began to look at each other slyly as if they had an unfathomable secret which like children they were unwilling to divulge.
‘You did listen to him, didn’t you?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes oh yes,’ they all replied like children chanting in a primary class. ‘Oh yes.’
‘Well then,’ said Donald, ‘I hope you learned from him.’
When he was about to leave the church at the end of the sermon he saw that left on top of one of the seats there was an image of Christ carved from wood and that the image represented a plump smiling man with a crown on his head and what appeared to be an animal like a deer in front of him. It looked suspiciously like the chief but he knew that it was meant to be Christ because of the yellow rays that shone from the crown. He threw it out into the strong barbarous sunlight which beat on the street with an even eternal heat.
Can I bear this heat? he asked himself. It is like hell itself. He looked down at his hands which were already turning brown. The collar was chafing his neck as usual.
He was about to eat one of the fruits from a neighbouring tree when he heard someone shouting, ‘They are poisonous.’ When he lowered his eyes from the tree and looked into the darkness of the sun he saw after a while that it was the witch doctor who had spoken and that down his face red and black stripes poured. His face like that of the chief was laughing.
That night he found by chance a diary that his predecessor had been keeping and after a short struggle with his conscience he began to read it, justifying his action on the grounds that he might find out more about the work ahead of him. He read by the light of the lamp, lying in the bed which was in the church itself. While he was doing so it occurred to him that he did not know anything at all about his predecessor, his appearance, his beliefs, his thoughts, and this troubled him a little, but he soon forgot about it as the contents of the diary occupied his mind more and more.
This is what he read:
17 March. I have arrived at this place at long last. Though Britain was dark and melancholy, this country is hot and bright. I think I will like it.
18 March. Today I spoke to the chief. He tells me that there are only ten in the congregation. When I preached to them I felt faint and helpless in this land where the sun is so torrid and where there are few shadows.
20 March. What can I do to help them? I am not a doctor, I am not a builder, I am not even a cultivator of the land. Is the gospel alone enough for them? These thoughts never occurred to me when I was in Britain but I can see that this tribe is poor and hungry and that I myself lack the skill to help them in their daily routine. I feel lonely, wretched and helpless. Who can feed the hungry on the gospel alone?
22 March. I told them about Abraham and Isaac and they understood the story perfectly. I feel there is no point in teaching them divinity or theology. They need flesh on the bones of the Word and the soul here is ghostly and white as if it did not belong. Yesterday I saw the witch doctor in his array and I thought he was laughing at me. Nevertheless all the people I meet are kind, but it seems to me that they think of me as a child whose actions have no real relevance to their lives. They humour me. My books have lost their meaning as if the sun were too strong for them and yet that should not be since the Gospel originally came from the hot lands of the East. The fact is that I feel superfluous here.
23 March. The chief and the doctor prayed for rain today. I reminded the chief that he was a Christian and he admitted that he was, but at the same time pointed out that the tribe could not exist without water. I myself in the secrecy of my heart put up a prayer for rain but no drop fell and the sky remained as blue and expressionless as ever. The loneliness grows worse. I am like a ghost moving about in the dark. This place frightens me though the people remain kind and thoughtful.
2 April. There was a fight between two men here yesterday and I stopped it. When I woke up this morning I heard that one of the men had been found stabbed during the night. If I had not stopped the fight would this have happened? Would the man be still alive? My principles are unsuited to this country. And yet if I lose them what remains to me?
3 April. I cannot conceal it any longer. The intense heat is arousing sinful passions in my heart and body and every day I see the women half naked and desirable. Would I be a better missionary if I succumbed to these lustful thoughts? If like a king from the Old Testament I got me a wife from among them? At night I lie awake listening to the cries of the beasts in the distance. They seem so natural to this land which is barbarous and wild. I feel that I am being burned by a fire that will eventually devour me. I read St Paul constantly.
22 April. When Regina walks about the village she is shown a certain respect as well as causing secret tittering laughter. She herself makes demands on me. She wants jewellery, bright ornaments and ribbons, the miscellaneous contents of our ruined western civilisation, in order to differentiate herself from the rest of the tribe. She cannot understand why I am so poor. Therefore I am placed in a dilemma. If I were to give her these things – which of course I don’t have – I would be surrendering to the world, and yet if I don’t she will leave me. Now she wants my collar because she finds its whiteness attractive. She exists in pride and desires riches: she is like a child lusting for toys. At the same time she is natural as water, the water that I used to see when I was in Britain, but of which there is a great scarcity here. Where has my soul gone? It seems to me that it is moving faintly among the green vegetation which repeats itself forever. Or it is like an eel shining in the drained river beds with a dead gleam. Her black face on the pillow beside me shows no shadow of thought, no cloud heavy with rain. I am like a shell empty and without the noise of the sea. What am I doing here? Why did I come in
the first place? Was it to escape from Europe as if I were fleeing from Sodom and Gomorrah? And look what has happened to me now. They demand nothing of me – they are like children – but more and more I feel myself existing on their charity. Is there no precious gift that I can give them? My Bible perhaps. But what should they do with these white pages? Is God Himself black in this country?
13 April. I know now what I am going to do. I am sure of it. It is not, I hope, blasphemous, though it might be construed as such. It came to me in a dream troubled by writhing limbs, clouds, lions and rocks. I think that the witch doctor knows of my purpose, the stripes on his face are glowing with pride and victory. There is no point in writing any more.
And the diary ended there.
Lying on his bed Donald wondered what the missionary’s confident purpose had been. He felt the church as a shell floating on the darkness, thin and powerless. And about him he heard the howlings of animals. His body was pouring with sweat and he would have liked at that moment to be back in Europe, in that corrupt continent of ancient crowded streets, of ingenious crooked paths. How am I going to pass the time here, he wondered. I am like a superfluous lily growing in the darkness that I do not understand and that frightens me. He put the diary under his pillow and composed himself for sleep. It seemed as if there was a tall white waterfall humming in his mind and that when he looked into it he saw cunning kind faces coiled as if in a secret conspiracy.
The following morning he went in search of Banga’s wife in order to bring her back to her husband. Tobbuta’s hut was deep in the forest whose leaves cast a deep green shade, though now and again the sunlight made a wavering glimmer between the trees. Donald followed the faint continually renewed path which human feet had made among the vegetation, hearing now and again the whistling of unseen birds. O world which God has made, he said, how beautiful you are, how abundant with blessings. After a while he saw two or three huts in a glade in front of him and asked a small naked boy which one was Tobbuta’s. The boy pointed and he walked towards it, sensing all the while that he was being watched by curious vague eyes.
Tobbuta was sitting in front of his hut carving a piece of wood with a knife.
‘I have come to take Banga’s wife back to him,’ said Donald.
Tobbuta raised his head and looked at him. Then without speaking he indicated to him the inside of the hut where in half-darkness Donald could see a woman sitting with two little girls beside her.
‘You will have to come back to your husband,’ he told her. ‘I have an order from the chief. I have come to fetch you.’
The woman screamed as if he had pierced her with a knife or as if she were a wild animal in the forest transfixed by a suddenly thrown spear. The two girls grasped her hands with a fierce frightened grip, staring at Donald as if he were an enemy who had come white and blatant out of the safe darkness and greenery outside.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘Your husband is waiting for you.’
She rose slowly to her feet and went out and he could hear her talking to Tobbuta in a low dead voice. Tobbuta was still sharpening his piece of wood and the woman stood beside him, obedient and slightly bowed, like a cow that waits for the axe to fall. The two girls stood beside her, gazing up at her with an intent gaze.
The missionary thought that what was happening had happened before, that he was standing in the middle of eternity where events are motionless and without meaning, that Tobbuta had been carving his wood forever, and that the world was heavy and fixed without profundity or purpose. The bodies of Tobbuta and his wife were solid in the sunlight, time had ceased to flow, they were images present to him and yet distant at the same time.
When he left, the woman and her two children walked in front of him. Tobbuta raised his head momentarily and looked at him, the knife glittering in his hand. The woman took nothing with her, she walked into the forest bare and without possessions. In the heavy silence they walked through the trees, she ahead of him with her children, he behind. It was as if he was bringing some quarry home from hunting, a wounded deer for instance that had not yet died.
He saw her black legs, her black thighs, ahead of him and he thought, I do not know anything about her, her existence is dark to me, she is anonymous and black. But the Bible supports me with its white pages, it shines among the rank green secretive foliage. Her body was stately and proud, inviolate and self-contained. Is it love that I am destroying, he wondered, but no voice answered him and now and again the girls would look at him with frightened yet obedient eyes.
He made them stop in the middle of the forest and knelt and prayed among a tangle of dried roots, feeling a weight on his spirit as if a terrible catastrophe were preparing itself in the silent forest. He prayed for a long time, the other three waiting patiently, as if wondering what he was about, but the forest was impervious to his prayer and his eyes were continually drawn to a group of ants carrying huge burdens across the dry roots.
When he rose to his feet at last he offered the woman some water but she refused to take it, looking at him with an indifferent gaze. It occurred to him that the forest itself was like a church with its tall green columns, its damp aisles. He tried to talk to her as if he were trying to rid himself of an unintelligible guilt. ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated over and over, ‘but you have sinned. God has seen your sin and he has sent me, his servant, on this errand to you.’ But her eyes were still indifferent and dead, as if she did not understand what he was talking about, as if his words were as random as the patches of light that the sun sometimes cast on the foliage around him. She accepted him as she would have accepted a thunderstorm or lightning from the sky or a flood from a river. He was like a natural hazard that she did not even try to fathom. He noticed that there were stripes on her back as if someone had at one time beaten her fiercely and he felt the whip so tightly in his hand that he clenched his teeth.
God help me, he prayed, but there was only the greenness around him and in places the blue of the sky above him.
Sometimes he thought that some terrible event was about to happen, he had a deep premonition in his bones. And now and again he would glance behind him as if he were expecting Tobbuta with raised knife to appear out of the forest. But he saw no movement at all among the becalmed leaves. Why then do I feel this ominous trembling in my stomach, he asked himself, unfastening his collar because of the windless heat.
At last they reached the hut where Banga was waiting. I have finished my work now, he thought. I have delivered my message. He left the woman, her head bent and obedient in front of Banga, and when he looked back once he thought that the four united people were like black images sunk in eternity and that he himself was a ghost wandering with messages about a world that he did not understand. When he reached the church he prayed again: O God I do not feel at ease in this land, I do not understand what is happening around me. I am feeling the pangs of the flesh. Even today when I was walking through Your forest I trembled when I saw her black thighs and her breasts. It is You who must help me in this mysterious country, in this darkness that continually enfolds me, though the sun is so strong.
When he had ended his prayer he began to wash his hands over and over and then his face. He removed his collar which was chafing his neck. When he looked in the mirror he saw the mark that the collar had left and it reminded him of the scars on the woman’s back where a whip had lashed her. Love, what is love? Tobbuta had not tried to keep her after all and it was probably he who had beaten her. The chief’s order had frightened Tobbuta and that was why he had surrendered Banga’s wife to him.
He began to read the Bible as if searching for a story that would duplicate the one in which he had just been involved, and was so immersed in it that he hardly noticed the descending darkness and it was only when he heard the distant melancholy roaring of the beasts that he put the book down. He had found no tale that spoke to him of similar circumstances: the Bible was like an inscrutable stone darkening in front of him.
On the following
day the weather was as hot and calm as it had always been and when the missionary stood outside the church in the morning he felt like a chief surveying his own territory. But at that very moment of tranquillity and poise when at last he felt at home in the freshness and the growing light of the country to which he had come, he saw Banga coming towards him at a stumbling run, and suddenly the street was full of watching people. Banga was holding a knife in his hand and Donald saw with fear and horror and at the same time an inevitable knowledge that there was blood on it. This is a drama, he thought, as he saw the silent people, this isn’t really happening, this has been staged for my benefit, and Banga is the chief actor. But the latter sank down on his knees in front of him, the knife still in his hand, and lifted a face which streamed with tears.
‘I killed them,’ he screamed, while his body shook as if with fever. ‘I killed them all.’ He offered the missionary the knife as if suggesting that he should kill him, but Donald backed away. What is this drama, he was thinking. Is he doing this because he feels he has betrayed Christianity or our teachings.
‘She cried all the time,’ Banga was saying, ‘and the children cried as well. She wanted back to Tobbuta. And I raised the knife and killed her, and after that I killed the children because they wouldn’t stop crying. The shame was choking me. The shame was in my throat.’
He bent his head and shook with sobs. The missionary backed further away and then slowly and heavily as if he were trudging through water or a dream made his way towards Banga’s hut following the drops of blood. He stopped for a moment at the door in a dazzle of sunlight and after a while went in. He saw them all lying on the floor: their throats had been cut and their faces looked grey from the leakage of blood.
He began to tremble violently and then knelt as if to pray, but when he was trying to put words together his teeth chattered so much that he couldn’t make a sound. The words as before were breaking apart and he could not put them together.
The Black Halo Page 20