We are tied by an invisible string, thought Donald looking at the slightly wet gun in his hand. Inside the gun death was waiting, quiet and ready and exact, almost dapper. In a short while it would give a bark, and a deer would fall. And it occurred to him that he had never killed any animal in his whole life. Apart from Banga and his family, that was, and his face twisted in a painful smile. But a gun was simpler than that, pitiless, without feeling. The gun had come from Europe, from that white world that moved so confidently into the future. It had come out of that light and not from the darkness of Africa, it did not have the dirt of roots about it, it was clean and calm and elegant and self-contained.
At that moment they came to the end of the forest and the tall grass was in front of them, a vast sea of green: and he knew that they would soon see the deer. Past him as a ship passes another in mid-ocean he saw a tranquil yellow body glide, eyes gold-coloured and sunny, and he knew that it was a lion. He almost raised his gun and fired at the royal mane, but the lion was lost in the grass as quickly as it had appeared out of it. He clutched his gun firmly, feeling, strangely enough, no fear at all. He thought the others had not seen the lion, for they continued on their way without deviation, bent to the earth, the grass climbing their bodies like a river or a green stair so that sometimes he could hardly make them out at all.
But he sensed that the grass was alive with animals, that it was shifting and seething like a green silken flag around them, for now and again he would catch glimpses of eyes, claws, heads, and he felt as he had felt when moving through a cornfield once in his distant youth. And yet at the same time he would ask himself, What am I doing here? But he knew what the answer was: he was there because Miraga wanted food, and her body, like his own, was dependent on it. They existed in a green waving seething chain.
They were almost swimming through the grass which rose above their shoulders and was wet with dew. He raised the gun above his head so that it would be clear of the wetness and he thought wryly that if anyone were watching he would only see a gun moving above the grass, tall and bare, with a purposeful motion of its own.
The chief was making signs to him and the missionary saw that they had almost come out of the grass and that in front of them was a long wide river which was green with the reflection of the grass. Without sound the river flowed, a wide snake on which the sunlight flashed. In the distance the missionary thought he could hear the persistent thunderous noise of a waterfall, but the river itself was placid and smooth.
They were now near its bank though still hidden in the long wet grass and when Donald looked he saw a sight that he had never seen in his whole life and that he would probably never see again. The bank was crowded with deer of all kinds, horned and unhorned; with small and large gold-coloured animals; with zebras whose beautiful mortal stripes leaped out of the light.
On all of them the sun flashed as they stood quietly drinking, a friendly congregation. The only noise in the whole universe was their drinking, their lapping of the water from the river.
How helpless, beautiful, strange, they looked in the rays of the sun in that far place, thought Donald: it was as if they had leaped at that very moment into history, as if they had not existed at all till he and the other tribesmen had arrived, as if they were in some way a startlingly abrupt answer to their desire for meat. Rich abundant flesh glittered and gleamed in front of them in the multitudinous light. Now and again Donald would see a deer lift its head from the water and then look dreamily ahead of it as if it were seeing a sight invisible to anyone but itself among the foliage that came down to the further bank of the green sluggish river. Then it would slowly and almost regretfully lower its head again.
Flesh, flesh, his body was crying and his soul was saying, How beautiful they are. He raised his gun and aimed it. At the far end of the gun he saw a back, flanks, a head. He saw a spear curve out of the grass, hang in the air for a moment, and then quiver into the body of a deer, and at that very moment he fired. When the noise fell out of the sky the deer began to scatter, wildly making a huge thunder about him, shaking the very ground on which he was standing. Spear after spear plunged out of the sky, hovering, needling the wax-coloured flesh, and the gun fired again and again. And the deer moved hither and thither as if dazzled and not knowing what to do. There was blood on the earth, and in the water into which some of the animals had fallen. His companions had now jumped out of the grass but the deer were running away at full speed as if at last they had identified their enemy. There was tumult and noise about him, heads rising out of the grass, tormented and frightened, and then suddenly disappearing. In a short while there was complete silence.
They all walked out of the long grass and looked down at the dead animals. Of these there were only five altogether. He himself stared down – the gun in his hand emptied of its cartridges as an animal of its litter, and it was as if he had forgotten it. He saw black breasts panting and sighing, swelling and fading, he saw faint distant eyes gazing at him as if out of eternity, he saw blossoms of blood opening on the flanks of the animals and he stood above them, compassionate and just. After all death was a part of life. And then he saw the ten tribesmen looking at him. And he knew that he should not have fired the gun so quickly, that all he had succeeded in doing was scatter the quarry, that they had expected far more meat than was now lying, some of it still alive, on the bank of the river.
For a long time they looked at him in silence and he knew that he had made a terrible mistake. Their gaze was directed at him like so many spears, though they did not speak. And then the thought came to him; I shall be shamed in front of the tribe. Perhaps I should kill all the witnesses now. But he knew that he could not do that and in any case his gun was empty. His throat was sick with humiliation and he could not meet their eyes. Can I never do anything right in this country? And then the question rose in front of him as tall as the grass itself. What if Miraga leaves me now that I haven’t brought home the meat that she wanted? He looked around him continually as if searching for some salvation from the grass or from the river, but they remained as they always were, in their own silence. Heavily he bent down and hoisted a deer from the ground, one of his companions taking the other end, and together, though separate, they began to make their way back to the village.
He was standing in front of the hut, the chief beside him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he was saying over and over, ‘I’m sorry sorry sorry. What will I do now? Will Miraga leave me?’ And he began to shake as if he were in high fever.
‘I don’t know,’ said the chief gravely.
Donald knelt in front of him. ‘I do not want to lose her. I’ll do anything.’
‘The people are angry,’ said the chief. ‘I shouldn’t have given you the gun,’ and it occurred to Donald: perhaps he gave me the gun for a deep reason of his own. He knew what was going to happen. But he said aloud, ‘What can I do? I’ll do anything.’
He was on his knees in a net of shadows while the chief looked down at him.
‘We will have to go to war for our food then,’ said the chief. ‘We will have to fight another tribe and take the food from them.’ He gazed blandly and innocently at Donald.
‘War?’ said Donald.
‘Yes,’ replied the chief. ‘The deer won’t return till next year, and we cannot do without meat.’
My soul that was once white is growing dark again, thought Donald. When will this confusion and trouble end?
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I can use the gun in the war.’
‘Good,’ said the chief, ‘good.’ And he left. Donald went into the hut where Miraga was sitting. When he entered she didn’t speak to him. He kissed her but her lips were cold. ‘If you leave me I am lost,’ he told her but still she didn’t speak: she was a statue of black marble.
He went out again restlessly and sat in front of the hut as he had seen the natives do, but it wasn’t long before he got up and went into the hut again.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what happened to the ot
her missionary.’
‘He died.’
‘How did he die?’
‘He killed himself.’
‘That’s not right,’ said Donald fiercely. ‘I’m sure that’s not right. Tell me what happened.’ And he was so angry that he was ready to kill her.
‘Tell me the truth,’ he shouted.
‘When the rain didn’t come,’ she said, ‘he offered his body as a sacrifice. He was crucified on a cross. In the forest. His bones are among the other bones. He said that he wasn’t doing any good in this country and so he sacrificed himself. When he died the rains came and the grass was green and wet again.’
He threw her away from him and thought that what she had said must be true. That must have been what the missionary meant by the entry in his diary, by his confident unnamed resolution.
‘And the rains came,’ he said meditatively.
‘Yes.’
‘Why did the chief send you to me?’ he asked.
‘He commanded me. I don’t know.’
He looked deep in her eyes.
‘Do you love me?’
‘Love?’
She didn’t understand what the word meant. He had failed to provide her with meat and the meat was so closely connected with love that she found it difficult to focus on what he now was. Neither provider nor lover.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said and he went out again to sit in the sun which poured from the sky with a ruthless barbarous light. He realised that both the chief and the witch doctor were his enemies and yet he knew that he could not leave Miraga.
He was entrapped by the flesh, and the soul like a lost bird was flying about the forest.
He went into the hut again. ‘You won’t leave me, will you?’ he asked humbly. ‘I will go and fight with the tribe. You will be loyal and stay here?’
‘Everything is natural,’ she answered and her mind and soul were closed against him.
In the Old Testament, he said to himself, it tells how the kings sacrificed to God before they went out into battle. Should I do that too?
‘We put our father out of the house,’ said Miraga quietly.
‘What?’ said Donald, filled with fear and horror.
‘We put him out of the house. My sisters and I.’
‘Where is he?’ said Donald.
‘In the forest. We put him out when we realised that there wouldn’t be enough meat for all of us.’
My fault my fault again, thought Donald with anguish. She put her arms around him and began to kiss him. ‘Wasn’t that the right thing to do?’
He felt her breast on his own, her heart beating against his.
‘No, it wasn’t right,’ he shouted. And all the time she was trying to pull him down on the bed.
‘It wasn’t right.’
And then he was again in the darkness which was full of blood and agony and happiness and the roaring of animals. He was turning in the river, throwing the water away from him.
‘The witch doctor told us it was right,’ she said, her lips nibbling his ear. He rose from the bed and washed his face in the bucket of water. In his mind’s eye he saw the old man sitting like a bird in the middle of the forest. I should go and find him, save him, he thought, but he felt too tired to do so. A weight of sun and shadows was all about him.
It was as if his gun fired again and again and again and the old man with his closed senile beak fell from branch after branch on to the forest floor.
All the time the drums were beating and the witch doctor was dancing with antlers on his head. Drums, drums, dancers circling, now and again giving a high thin piercing cry as if they had been pierced by spears. They danced around the ring of fires, and then threaded them, in and out, with their sweating naked bodies. The missionary’s feet were almost moving, on the point of dancing, and in that place he knew that he could have let all his repressed emotions dance themselves out to the four winds, give them their freedom. He saw one strong muscular man in particular lost in a fantasy of war of his own, his mouth open, his face a glazed mask, his right hand thrusting a spear again and again into the empty sky.
‘That’s Morga,’ the chief whispered in his ear. ‘He is the bravest of the tribe. Last time he killed ten men.’ Donald gazed at the rapt sweating vacant face, the thrusting spear, the eyes which had lost their humanity and had gained in its place the lust of an animal or a demon.
He couldn’t remember when he himself had danced last. Was it at the corner of the road on an autumn night when the moon was full and red in the sky, like a hen brooding? Autumn; dancing, girls, the moon: and a bridge. He looked up into the sky and there was the moon, distant, white, calm, a white plate, sailing about the heavens. It seemed to remind him of his home, distant, cold and white. My own world, he thought, the world that I abandoned. I am a stranger in this land. He felt dizzy, and almost touched the chief for support lest he should fall down. The dance, the dance, and the witch doctor looking at him now and again, with his striped body, his long pointed antlers, while Morga danced in his secret fever of battle.
‘They are praying to their god,’ said the chief. ‘They are praying that he send them a lot of birds, for the souls of their dead enemies go into the bodies of the birds.’
A departing shower of birds like leaves in autumn setting off to warm distant lands, leaving behind them the bare stubbly fields, the reaped corn. The moon in the sky and the dancers dancing, Donald’s body began to shake to the sound of the drums which seemed to have penetrated his skin, which seethed inside him like milk inside a churn.
Shall I let myself dance, he thought, shall I descend into darkness with the enchanted Morga? And at that very moment a piercing thin cry poured between his lips, a howl of freedom. He was like a bird flying about, looking for light in the dark, seeking the sun. His feet were beating on the ground, all his anger, resentment, fear, hatred, was pouring out of his body as dirty water pours down a sewer pipe: all jealousy, malice, enmity pouring out of him, leaving his body empty and light like a shell that contains a new music. He was among the crowd in the darkness, he was with them, he was in communion with them, he would never be alone again, he was leaving behind him the solitude of Europe (the advertisements that blow about the streets in the wind), he was leaving that white naked desolation behind him. Once he had been a single spear in the world, pushing through time, the prow of a ship. But now he was part of the crowd, part of the blood, of the sound of the drums, of the sweaty entranced bodies. He saw his mind departing like a ray of moonlight, going into hiding among the deep dense dark leaves, and he himself was in the safe darkness. Why had he never sensed that safety before? Why had he been so long alone, fighting against time when this warm rich life was present in the world? But now time itself had left him (for time was a sickness, a plague) and he was at last in Africa. He was at last in the middle of the true music. He saw himself from afar, as if he were millions of miles away, and the witch doctor was laughing through the coloured bars of his face. He heard himself shrieking and crying as the others were doing, and the noise he made was like that which he had heard at night in the church from the wild animals that infested the woods. He was in a ring of joy, of freedom, and the moon was spinning and spinning faster through the dark clouds, entering them and emerging cleaner and whiter and wilder than before.
He had a spear in his hand and he was thrusting it into the sky. I am coming, I am the black hero, I will destroy whiteness. I am alive in darkness, I am in the undergrowth of the forest, my white roots are pushing through the blackness. The water of freedom was pouring through his body, he was like a waterfall which sings tall and eternal in the forest, the music was running out through his beak. He was so light that he could almost fly.
And at that moment the drums stopped, there was an enormous silence as the world steadied in its course, and the witch doctor was making a sign to the crowd. There he stood, powerful and triumphant, in his antlers, in the red and white stripes that poured down his face, and then he was pointing at
Donald with a commanding finger. Words were coming from his mouth, surely he didn’t . . .
‘Pray,’ said the witch doctor. ‘Pray for us.’
‘Pray,’ he said, ‘to your own God that our enterprise be successful and lucky.’ And his face was a white blaze of triumph, of glory, of power, like a moon that shines with transcendent light.
Donald stood where he was in the middle of the forest, inside the rings of fire, in a silence that seemed to throb with the absent music.
Miraga, Miraga, Miraga, what will I not do for you?
For your body, for the freedom that you have given me, for your thighs, your breasts, your mouth, your lips.
‘Pray,’ said the witch doctor insistently, and Donald felt someone put an animal’s mask over his face. It stank of an ancient rank violent smell.
Kneeling on the earth he began to pray. ‘May God assist us in our expedition, may he give us victory over our enemies . . . ’ The words came out of his mouth hesitantly as they had done before he had come to Africa, they were like stones in a black river.
The Black Halo Page 22