The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

But he prayed and when he rose to his feet he felt as naked as a bird in winter, its wings shivering. He felt as if there were red and white stripes pouring down his very soul.

  The tribe followed a path through the forest that they had obviously followed often before, the chief leading, followed by Morga and then by Donald. They were all maintaining an easy half-run which did not seem to tire them at all.

  Now and again a bird would rise screaming out of the trees and then angrily make its way to another branch on which it rested. Donald was trying not to think at all. Would he be able to kill anyone? And what of the children and the women? But it was his responsibility that there was a shortage of food and therefore there was no alternative but to do what he was doing.

  Now and again the chief would glance behind him as if he wished to see whether Donald was still there and then, satisfied, turn his head to the front again.

  Donald had no idea what sort of tribe they were going to fight, but it occurred to him that he could safely keep his distance, for he had a gun - he would never, he knew, have used a spear - and the thought comforted him, though its hypocrisy was evident. He gripped the gun more tightly as if it were in a strange way his saviour. He had to get food or Miraga would leave him: that was all he must consider.

  The chief stopped and made a signal for silence to the rest of the tribe, for they had now come on to a bare open place in which there were rocks, hills, rivers, but no trees. The tribe became even quieter than it had been, if that were possible. Donald heard the noise of a waterfall and felt that he was back in Scotland again, for the landscape looked Scottish, broken, rough, bare of animals.

  He suspected that they were approaching their destination and felt a sharp sick pain in his stomach. And at that moment he saw the waterfall, the waterfall of his dream, tall and white and overwhelmingly powerful.

  Something is going to happen to me here, he thought, in this very place. My soul is to be tested here.

  The waterfall was so clear in front of his eyes that he began to tremble with fear. He looked around him but all he saw were black expressionless faces concentrated on the task ahead of them as if they were tranced masks. And it occurred to him that the whole mission was a dream, that he wasn’t in Africa at all but in Scotland, that there was no chief of a tribe running so easily ahead of him, that the only reality was the pouring waterfall. And then there happened the moment of proof that his soul had foreseen.

  Morga suddenly shouted and they all saw a small black boy running as it were out of the heart of the waterfall as if he had been disporting himself in it or perhaps drinking from its very centre. And they knew by his sudden flight that he had seen them. Both Morga and the chief turned to look at Donald and at the gun in his hand and he recognised as if it were a predestined fact that he was the only one who was able to prevent the boy from returning to warn his tribe.

  As if in a dream he stared down at the gun. As if in a dream he raised it to his eye, steadying it as much as he could for the trembling of his hands. The boy was running and he himself could see the fugitive with absolute clarity. The boy became larger and larger, almost filling the sights. Now and again he would turn and look behind him and it seemed to Donald that he was gazing particularly at him. He had only to pull the trigger and the boy would fall to the ground. The waterfall poured in front of him, ghostly, tall and resonant, and the boy was ahead of him and Miraga’s face winked momently out of the waterfall and then faded back into it. The whole tribe had come to a standstill and were looking at him, and he heard a cry like that of an animal leave his throat and hover above him in the air.

  ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,’ he was shouting over and over again. The chief glanced at him and then took the gun from his hand and fired. ‘Go on boy, go on,’ he heard himself shouting, and then the gun fired again. But the boy was still running, zigzagging from side to side as if he knew perfectly well what sort of death was being aimed at him. And in a strange way Donald felt that the boy who was running was himself. It was he himself who was fleeing at the far shelter of the waterfall, it was he himself who was trying to save his life, it was his own breath that was being inhaled and exhaled. And then the boy was safe, disappeared from view, and the missionary still in the dream saw Morga’s spear hover over him. But the chief barked something, like the report from a gun, and with an angry expression Morga put his spear down again.

  He turned away and then the chief turned away and as the latter did so it was almost with a pitying reluctance as if Donald were a loved apostate from his church or one whom he had failed to convert. The whole tribe turned away and Donald felt such pain as he had felt once when he had become converted and his friends had mockingly left him.

  He found himself lying on the ground staring up at the sky. He was broken, empty. He put his hands to his cheeks to feel with amazement the thick growth of hair which had sprung there so quickly, like vegetation. He lifted the gun that the chief had thrown on the ground, and returned home, following his feet.

  He knew that his failure was fatal, that he was without home, without country, almost without name, and that his body hardly cast a shadow on the earth. He walked slowly, commiserating with himself, having forgotten the battle towards which the tribe was heading. Without surprise he came to the glade in which he had seen the bodies being buried in the trees and saw in front of him a skeleton as diminutive as a child’s. There was nothing left but the bones, for the beaks like sewing machines had stripped them clean and though it was only bones he knew it was the skeleton of Miraga’s father. The arms – or the bones where the arms had been – were extended away from the central spine as if they had been in search of something, an impossible mirage of food, and he gazed down at the horizontal ladder which they made without thought or feeling. All this seemed natural. He looked at the bones for a little while and then he left the place.

  He was going back to his own hut, to Banga’s bequeathed home, the only one he now had and by his side he carried the gun, dumb, absurd, without meaning.

  ‘Why have you come back?’ Miraga asked him. ‘What’s wrong?’

  He didn’t answer her directly but said, ‘If I leave this place will you come with me?’

  ‘Leave this place?’ and her voice was an incredulous echo of his own. It was clear that the idea had never occurred to her in her whole life, that the thought was inconceivable, beyond the limits of her imagination.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘leave this place.’ And there was anger in his voice. Why couldn’t everything be simpler than it was?

  ‘I can’t,’ she repeated. ‘Why are you back?’

  ‘I came home alone.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why, why why,’ he shouted. ‘Why are you always asking questions.’ And there was an enormous barrier between them, they belonged to two worlds. She was going out of the door when he stopped her. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘You won’t leave here,’ he shouted and threw her on the bed. He was screaming, his voice high and trembling like the voice of a boy. He would have liked to put his hands around her throat and throttle her. The only connection between her and him was violence. She lay on the bed like a stranded fish, her eyes wide with fear.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Are you coming or aren’t you?’

  ‘No. I can’t. No one has ever left the village. It has never happened.’

  ‘You stupid bitch,’ he shouted silently, his throat choked with fear and rage and shame. He was out of his mind with terror.

  And all the time he was thinking how beautiful she looked, lying there on the bed, her breast rising and falling.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I will find another man.’

  He raised the gun to his eye and saw her clearly through the sights. He was trembling with anger and frustration. For a long time he looked at her and then threw the gun down on the floor and scrambled out of the hut.

  He didn�
��t know where he was going and he only looked back once to see if she was at the door but she wasn’t. The place where she should have been was empty. He walked past the church and then, as if a memory had struck him, returned and stood gazing at it, white in the sunlight. He thought of the pulpit, the seats, the cross on the pulpit cloth, large and blue; it was not an oasis but a mirage in the desert of his mind. He noticed that the leaves were growing luxuriously round the windows, almost hiding them from view. Then he began to run into the forest where he felt cool and sheltered. There was no destination in his mind, he felt neither hunger nor thirst. He was a ghost drifting about the day. He ran and walked and finally found himself standing in front of the waterfall.

  He stood and looked at it as if he were asking it a question in the hot dumb day. It was like an eel that twists and turns, a white fraying rope, foaming and torrential. He sat in front of it as if he were a pupil in front of a teacher waiting for the latter to tell him the meaning of the world. He thought of his youth, of his father with his flowing white beard. He thought of his home, of the journey on which he had come.

  The waterfall was pouring and pouring and giving him no answer, a white snake in the day. Its senseless music was all around him. What have I done to my life, he thought, this unrepeatable life? But the waterfall continued its rotation. The soul, the soul, the white soul where has it gone? This land has destroyed me. It has maddened me. And the waterfall poured down and he looked deeply into it. He would have liked to have sat there forever, fallen asleep there. He thought of the chief and knew that he had been his enemy from the beginning, all he had wanted to do was keep his tribe together. He had played on the previous missionary’s sense of uselessness, it was all so natural.

  He heard a voice in his mind and it kept saying over and over, everything is natural. Rage, hatred, malice, death, they are all natural. Even love is natural, and a ray of pain stabbed him, as deep as a spear. Natural, natural, natural, the birds were twittering, the waterfall was saying. That waterfall had been there from the beginning of the world, it had been there before he had been born or had thought of coming to Africa. It had been there in his days of the natural man and then after his conversion. The waterfall had in a strange way been waiting for him, confronting him with its absurd question. All the time that he had been talking about the Sabbath – and where were the Sabbaths now? They were all intertwined into one long tedious day – the waterfall had been waiting and laughing. That senseless froth and foam had been rotating.

  And all the time that he himself was sitting there, the battle was going on elsewhere: two tribes were fighting, one to retain its food, the other to capture it. The lion was killing the deer. And then at that very moment as if it had stepped out of his mind on dainty natural feet a white deer descended from a hill above, went into the waterfall and began to drink from it. Now and again it would raise its head meditatively and look at Donald. It didn’t seem at all frightened. How beautiful you are, thought Donald, how beautiful and elegant and calm. Perhaps I shall sit here forever like a Saint Columba in Africa. Perhaps people will come to me and be blessed from my corruption that will never again be washed clean. Perhaps the deer will come and lick the hand that carried the gun. But the deer suddenly turned away and was no longer there.

  Donald looked after it and then saw a figure coming towards him. His heart leaped with joy for he thought it was Miraga. He began to wave and shout, ‘I’m here, I’m here.’ And the echo shouted among the rocks above the noise of the waterfall, ‘I am here.’ The figure was steadily approaching and then he saw with a sinking of the heart that it was not Miraga. In a short while Tobbuta was standing beside him.

  ‘I saw you,’ he said.

  Are we going to fight now, Donald asked himself, tiredly. Is this what we are going to do? Will this never end, this wheel of water?

  But Tobbuta began to pour a torrent of words out of his lips.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ he was saying. ‘I can’t rest. I am going mad. I came to speak to you,’ and he went on his knees in front of him. ‘Ever since Banga killed my sweetheart I can’t sleep.’ Tears were pouring out of his eyes. ‘I want your God to help me. I want to be a Christian. I tried to kill myself, but I couldn’t. I tried to become a Christian before but my nature was too fierce.’ He showed Donald a carving that he had made. And then Donald knew that this was the carving he had been working on when he met him first. ‘She didn’t want me to become a Christian because of what happened to Banga. But now I know that I have sinned. Your God is punishing me.’

  Donald looked down at him, and heard behind him the music of the waterfall and he laughed. His laughter was a repeated echo among the rocks. His vast laughter resonated among the hollow rocks. He went down on his knees while still laughing. And in that strange moment when the whole world came to a stop and he could no longer hear the waterfall at all, he knew that it wasn’t the chief who had won, that it wasn’t he who had woven the rope around him. He knew that it was God who had done that. Murder and death had been a plague around him simply in order that Tobbuta would be saved.

  ‘Who are you,’ he asked, ‘that deserved all this?’ But the face in front of him was expressionless and black.

  On his knees he began to pray. ‘I am in Thy hands,’ he said, ‘in Thy hands. You are here even in Africa, even in the darkness. Your voice is deeper and more mysterious than that of the waters.’ And the words came smoothly without hesitation from his mouth.

  And the sound of the waterfall was becoming stronger and louder. He rose from his knees and felt on his back a heavy joyful burden. He put his hand out to Tobbuta. ‘Come,’ he said.

  He turned and looked for a long time at the village from which he had come. ‘Come,’ he repeated. ‘Everything is natural. Everything is forgiven.’

  At the Fair

  The day was very hot as had been most of the days of that torrid summer and when they arrived at the park where the fair was being held she found that there was no space for her car: so she had to cruise around the town till she found one, cursing and sweating. It was at times like these, when she felt hot and prickly and obscurely aggressive, that she wished Hugh could drive, but he had tried a few times to do so and he couldn’t and that was that. It wasn’t a big car, it was only a Mini, but even so there didn’t seem to be any space for it anywhere, and policemen were everywhere waving drivers on and sometimes flagging them down to give them information. However after half an hour of circling and backtracking, she did manage to find a place, a good bit away from the fair, and after she had locked the doors the three of them set off towards it. In the early days, before she had got married, she hadn’t bothered to lock the car at all. Even if a handle fell off a door, like the one for instance that wound down the window, she didn’t bother having it repaired, and the back seat used to be full of old newspapers and magazines which she had bought but never read. Now, however, it was tidy, as Hugh (though, or because, he didn’t drive) kept it so. He also polished it regularly every Sunday, since he didn’t do any writing on Sundays, finding that three hours a day for five days in the week satisfied whatever demon possessed him. She herself worked full-time in an office while he stayed at home writing and making sure that their little daughter who was not yet of school age didn’t burn herself or fall down the stairs or do anything that endangered her welfare.

  It was a Saturday afternoon and it was excessively hot, but in spite of the heat Hugh was wearing a jacket and this irritated her. Why couldn’t he be like other men and go about in his shirt sleeves; why must he always wear a jacket even when the sun was at its most glaring, and how could he in fact bear to do so? She herself was wearing a short yellow dress with short sleeves which showed her attractive round arms, and the little girl was wearing a white frilly dress with a locket bouncing at her breast. She looked down at her tanned arms and was surprised to see them so brown since she had been working all summer at her cards in the office catching up with work caused by Margaret’s long absence. But
of course at weekends she and her husband and the little girl went out quite a lot. They drove to their own secret glen and sometimes sat and picnicked listening to the noise of the river, which was a deep black, muttering unintelligibly among the stones. The blackness and the noise reminded her for some strange reason of a telephone conversation which had somehow gone wrong, spoiling instead of creating communication. Sometimes they might take a walk up the hill among the stones and the fallen gnarled branches and very rarely they might catch a glimpse at the very top, high above them, of a deer standing questioningly among trees. She loved deer, their elegance and their containment, but her husband didn’t seem to bother much.

  The little girl Sheila was taking large steps to keep up with the two of them, now and again taking her mother’s hand and gazing gravely up into her face as if she were silently interrogating her, and then withdrawing her hand quickly and moving away. She talked hardly at all and was very serious and self-possessed. In fact it seemed to her mother that she was more like what she imagined a writer ought to be than Hugh was, for he didn’t seem to notice anything but wandered about absent-mindedly, never listening to anything she was saying and never calling her attention to any interesting sight in the world around him. His silence was profound. She had never seen anyone who paid so little attention to the world: she sometimes thought that if a woman with green hair and a green face walked past him he wouldn’t notice. That surely was not the way a writer ought to be.

  Anyway he wasn’t a very successful writer as far as sales went. He had had two small books of poetry published by printing presses no one had ever heard of except himself, and had sold one short story to an equally unknown magazine. She had long ago given up trying to understand his poetry. He himself wavered between thinking that he was a good poet as yet unrecognised and a black despair which made her impatient and often angry with him. In any case the people they lived among didn’t know about writing and certainly couldn’t have cared less about poetry: if you didn’t appear on TV you weren’t quoted. They lived in a council house in a noisy neighbourhood which seemed to have more than the average share of large dogs and small grubby children who stared at you as you went by.