The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  The minister was actually quite a small man but extraordinarily intense. He seemed really to believe that there was no death, that death is an alteration and not an end, that we go through a sunny doorway into another more perfect world.

  The child and the little girl played with each other in the sunlight. Then they chased a rainbow-coloured ball behind a sofa, their heads close together. The girl was much more active than the boy, more, even, aggressive. The boy sometimes stared in wonderment at the world: how could there be guilt in such a world?

  When we came out of the church (my wife, myself and our son) the space in front of and beside the building was congested. It took us a long time to manoeuvre our way out and reach the cemetery even though there was a policeman directing the traffic. We parked the car and walked between the tall steel gates. The streets of the graveyard were straight and clean: in the distance we could see the sea, which glittered and over which a wandering cold breeze moved hesitantly. In front of us were the strong men from the island, stolid and robust, wearing only jackets in spite of the bitter wind. Their faces were as craggy as rocks. Some of the women cried humbly into handkerchiefs. The men got into position around the coffin, each clutching a cord. The dead man’s widow couldn’t bear coming to the graveside – ‘I have done my duty,’ she said, ‘I cannot bear it.’ We shivered in the wind.

  My son said, in the hearing of the big men, ‘They are supposed to be handsome, these old men. Mother’s glasses need examining.’ They smiled affectionately like rocks cracking. The minister wasn’t wearing a coat either: young and intense he spoke out of the cold wind. ‘There is no death, I am the Way and the Truth, I am the gateway to eternal life.’

  The two children were sitting beside each other examining a teddy bear, and poking at its shiny button-like eyes. They looked serious and intent in the sunshine of the kitchen. The man in the coffin had been young once too, he too had stared blue-eyed at the world. He had never expected that he would die in a strange hospital in the terrible city: he had wanted home but it was too late. All his life and even during his cancer he had been courageous: perhaps he had been acting a part, but his courage had nevertheless been real. ‘I don’t worry,’ he would say, ‘what’s the point of worrying. If you worry you die and if you don’t worry you die, so what’s the point?’ He used to sing songs in an affected voice, especially Irish songs and sometimes Italian ones.

  The cords lowered the coffin slowly into the hole in the ground. I heard the thud as they were let drop on the wood; it seemed a very final sound. Am I doing this right, the people who were holding the cords would be thinking, I don’t want to make a mistake, for the people round the graveside will be watching every move. Then the purple cloth was dropped on top of the coffin and then the wreaths. I could no longer see the coffin at all.

  The broad men in front of us turned round and began to talk to us. They were going back to the island the following day: there was the land to be tended to and the cattle, now that spring was approaching. The boat trip would take five hours or so. They didn’t seem at all cold in the strong bitter wind which blew in from the blue wrinkled sea.

  The eyes of the child were intensely blue. They were like a serene guiltless sky. For ages he would stare at us unwinkingly as if judging us, as if saying, I dare you to stare back at me so unblinkingly. His hands tugged at his father’s black tie. Then he stood in the sunlight and seemed eternal.

  We walked away from the graveside talking. There was one woman in particular who couldn’t remember the names of her relatives. ‘Is that Donald or is it James?’ she would say. ‘I’m so stupid.’ A man told of snow in the town from which he had come. ‘Six inches,’ he said. ‘Here it is so mild.’ ‘How tall you have grown,’ said one furred lady to our son. The big men were like moving stones. It didn’t look as if any of them would ever die. There was so much to be done on the croft: a new tractor had just been bought and one of the sons used it a lot, playing a radio from it which could be heard all over the village.

  The two children touched each other. ‘Up,’ said the little girl, and my wife lifted her on to the piano stool where she began to bang the keys again while the other child clapped his hands, delighting in the din.

  The man had been left in his coffin, which looked like a cradle. Perhaps he had stepped out of it and was elsewhere. Perhaps his soul, white as a gull, had flown into the sun.

  The child sat in his high chair banging with his spoon. The little girl gazed at him: he banged and banged as if he were playing a tune. His father raised him up to the ceiling and he shrieked with laughter and excitement. The sun shone on the living-room lighting up the music set, the fireplace, the yellow brassy bin, the statuette of the Virgin, tall and white, with the child in her arms. She was holding Him out to the world: and yet He was the world.

  The minister intoned, ‘Nothing shall separate us from the love of God.’

  We sang, ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’: it was not in the hymn book under the number the minister had said, but we all knew the words. They came back to us from our childhood, exact and true and poignant. Wasn’t it strange that we knew them, though we didn’t know that we did. My table Thou hast furnished in presence of my foes . . . The child made a paste of its food seriously and obsessively and then chucked some of it on the floor.

  Our feet crackled on pebbles as we left the grave: nothing could be seen but the flowers. We asked each other about cars, distances. Some were going to the hotel for a meal, some were not. The men from the islands were going to the hotel. They spoke to us secretively in Gaelic: it was like belonging to a separate mysterious world. I couldn’t help remembering the poem, The eternal sound of the sea, listen to the eternal sound of the sea. The dead man was sleeping by the sound of the sea. It was better for him to be here than in Glasgow in a stiff shroud, a stranger in a strange city.

  The child banged his spoon against the plate. The little girl clapped her hands. They belonged to another world, or did they? They were secretive strangers. On the other hand they were like us and would become like us, but at the moment they looked beautiful and immortal with their cherubic curls. The cradle shone and glittered like a coffin. The child had a pair of yellow shoes, his first ones. Everything was honey coloured, even the sunlight that lay in bars across the floor.

  The big tall men sat down at the table and ate heartily. Tomorrow they would return to their island. They laughed and told jokes from their childhood. The dead man seemed like a pretext for a feast, for laughter, for joy. How odd that death should bring us all together like this.

  Bang, bang, went the spoon. The little girl clapped her hands. Maybe in the coffin the dead man clapped his hands too. Maybe he was like a tiny baby in his cradle, blue eyes reflecting the blue sky above him.

  A Night with Kant

  Each evening Kant went for a walk. And as he walked he brooded about the Categorical Imperative. It seemed to him that the Categorical Imperative was as fixed as the sun.

  One night he saw a beggar beating up his woman, hitting her across the face over and over again. The beggar wore a long coat and his face was unshaven.

  ‘Shall I tell him about the Categorical Imperative?’ he asked himself, but decided against it, though the woman was screaming with a loud piercing voice.

  ‘You old fart, I’ll kill you,’ the beggar shouted. One eye shone madly in his head.

  Kant walked on in his neat suit. A watch ticked in his breast pocket. It seemed to him as he looked at the stars that the beggar and the woman were both necessary parts of the universe, as a mainspring was part of a watch.

  Another time he saw a thief stealing along with a bagful of stuff he had taken from a shop in which a window was starred and broken.

  ‘No, I’ll not tell on him,’ he thought. ‘I will let him go on his way. Why should I interfere? I am not God.’ The thief glared at him with piercing eyes as if saying, ‘If you tell anyone what I have done I will kill you.’

  Kant wondered what the mind of th
e thief was like, why he had stolen. He was troubled by the quick bright eyes, the eyes of a man who knew he was doing wrong and enjoying the sensation of it.

  How beautiful the stars were, that glittering city which seemed like a remote reflection of a real city. He imagined the stars as the souls of the dead, glittering. How really happy he was to be doing what he was doing. There was no one happier; he needed no other human being, he needed only his mind, the universe, that was all.

  Yet sometimes he was disturbed by strange thoughts. What if the world that he was seeing was an unreal spectral world? What if there was nothing out there that he could trust? What if there had been no thief at all, no beggar, no screaming woman? But he put these thoughts away from him as quickly as they had come. Why should he need a witness? Why couldn’t he depend only on himself?

  Another night a policeman stopped him and said, ‘Who are you? Why are you walking about the streets every night?’

  ‘I am a philosopher,’ said Kant. ‘I am thinking.’

  The policeman looked at him suspiciously.

  ‘I thought, sir,’ he said, ‘that you were following that young girl.’

  ‘What young girl?’ said Kant.

  ‘Never mind,’ said the policeman.

  Such a self-contained little man this was, such a funny precise man. Perhaps indeed he had been following that girl. You could never tell with these oldish people.

  Kant wondered whether he should mention the Categorical Imperative to the policeman. He couldn’t understand how the latter’s mind worked. In fact it seemed to him that he didn’t understand how anyone’s mind worked, except perhaps his own. The policeman too he considered had a secret violent eye. He was beginning to wonder whether the world was more treacherous, phantasmal, than he had originally considered it to be.

  Once he heard two women talking. One was saying to the other, gesturing furiously, ‘One should stand up for what one believes in. Speak straight out, that is what I think.’ Later he heard the same woman saying, ‘It doesn’t help to be blunt nowadays. It’s better to kowtow and take your hat off to your superiors.’

  Kant couldn’t understand how people could be so irrational, so contradictory. He wondered if perhaps the world was divided into two groups, the philosophers and the others. Nor could he understand how people were so noticing of the world around them, more noticing than he was.

  For instance he heard some men talking about a factory which had just been built. He had passed it every night and yet he hadn’t even seen it. Yet these men had studied it in minute detail.

  ‘They shouldn’t have a building like that one there,’ one man was saying. ‘It’s ugly, that’s what it is. It doesn’t fit in.’

  And the other man who was bald and fat, said, ‘They shouldn’t have hired a local firm. Do you know that they take much longer to finish the work? They take advantage, that’s what they do.’

  Kant gazed vaguely at the factory with its many windows. How had he not noticed it before? And yet factories were useful, they produced commodities. It occurred to him that he knew nothing about the workings of bakeries, butchers’ shops, nor did he know what butchers or bakers thought of, or how they conducted their lives. Yet he knew about the Categorical Imperative which they knew nothing of, and conducted their lives in ignorance of it.

  What is wrong with me, he asked himself, how do I not have eyes like other people?

  And it troubled him that he was so stupid as not to have noticed a factory like that rising from a site where before there had only been emptiness. Again he was stirred by vague guilty feelings. Could it be that these people knew more about the world than he did? Could it be that mice, dogs, cats and rats were more knowledgeable than he was? Could it be that people were secretly laughing at him because he appeared such a fool with his head in the clouds? Or perhaps at the same time as they thought this they also thought that he was a clever man, cleverer than they were themselves. And yet he didn’t feel himself to be clever at all. On the contrary he felt himself to be stupid, stupider than the men and women who noticed factories, and were aware of the inner workings of machines.

  Once he talked to a man whose job was building houses. ‘You put the foundations in first,’ the man said to him. ‘But sometimes you get a fellow coming from headquarters and he will tell you that the foundations aren’t deep enough, so you have to dig deeper. Dampness is one of the things you have to watch for when you are building a house. Condensation you have to look out for on windows. And you should make sure that the house blends in with its surroundings. All these things you have to remember. What do you do yourself?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Kant, ‘I am retired. ‘ He was ashamed to tell the man that he was a philosopher, that he sat in a study with books and pen and paper, and that he spent most of his time thinking.

  ‘I hope to be retired myself some day,’ said the man, ‘but at the moment I can’t afford to do that.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Kant.

  ‘Well, it’s like this,’ said the man. ‘It’s to do with my wife. She says I would be in her way in the house. Women are funny, you understand.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kant.

  ‘You see,’ the man continued comfortably, ‘you have to treat them carefully, as if you were walking on marshy ground. One minute my wife is saying to me, “You’re never at home to help about the house, you never put in shelves, you’re too tired”, and the next moment she’s saying, “I don’t want you to retire, you’d be in my way. Under my feet.” And that’s the fashion of it,’ said the man philosophically.

  ‘Take this place we’re sitting in,’ said the man. ‘Now you watch that girl there, the one in the yellow apron. Her name is Gretchen and I know for a fact she comes from a poor family. And yet she will turn up her nose if you don’t buy more than one cake. You have to watch the lie of the land, same as when you’re building a house. Now yourself now you’ll have experience of these things, I don’t need to be telling you them. I would say now you had been a schoolmaster.’

  ‘No,’ said Kant. ‘I don’t think of myself as a schoolmaster.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said the man confidently. ‘I can tell you were a scholar. I was never a scholar. All I ever read were instruction books.’

  ‘Are they difficult to understand?’ said Kant curiously.

  ‘Not if you keep your wits about you,’ said the man, who in actual fact wore glasses and in his stooping fashion himself looked like a scholar, and not a builder at all. ‘I’ve seen instructions written in languages that I don’t know but that doesn’t bother me. I have a picture in my head of what the thing is to be like. Instinctive, you understand. Sometimes I don’t need an instruction book at all. I’ll tell you something,’ he continued expansively. ‘Once I was putting in plumbing and this contraption came along and I’d never seen one like it before. But I installed it just the same.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said Kant.

  ‘Yes, it’s right enough. I have this instinct, you understand. Ever since I was a child. Some people don’t have it but I do. Now you take that factory out there. I wouldn’t have built it like that, and I would have finished it quicker. I wouldn’t have put in so many windows but you can’t tell these people anything.’

  After the man had left, Kant sat looking around him. Sitting in the café were two young people, the girl gazing into the boy’s eyes adoringly. She clasped his hands in hers and began to talk animatedly about some party which they had attended the previous night.

  ‘I saw her wearing the same dress before,’ the girl was saying, while at the same time she stroked the boy’s hands gently. ‘The pink one.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said the boy, gazing abstractedly into the girl’s eyes.

  ‘Of course, silly,’ said the girl. ‘Didn’t you notice? And another thing, she doesn’t have to tell me that she’s related to the Schumanns. I know for a fact she isn’t.’

  Kant stood up and went outside. He looked upward. The stars were numerous like seeds,
and remote and beautiful and sparkling. Space and time. They were the conditions of man’s existence.

  He glanced at his watch. It was seven o’clock at night.

  As he was walking along he was stopped by a young woman in a short skirt who said to him, ‘I can show you a good time.’ Her cheeks were artificially red and her legs were muscular and strong.

  ‘The time is seven o’clock,’ said Kant mildly. ‘It is neither better nor worse.’ The young woman looked at him in amazement and then tottered away arrogantly on her high heels. Kant was stirred by a regretful desire, so vague it was no more than a wandering breeze. And at that moment the Categorical Imperative was very distant indeed.

  It was like a ghostly axle in the sky.

  Around him were feverish images of colour which seemed to speak of freedom. And he felt very peculiar.

  ‘What am I doing in this place?’ he asked himself. ‘How did I arrive in this street which I walk so punctually every night? I can’t understand it.’ And it seemed to him that he could have done something different, been something very different. But the shell that he had constructed round himself protected him, and only late at night did he hear howls as if from the centre of space itself.

  Purity, purity, he said to himself. Purity is what I need. Simplicity. But how can one be a saint and live in the world? And he clutched firmly at his watch, that round golden globe on which he depended, in its exactitude. Always ticking like his heart. Except that unlike his heart it was renewable.

  Another night he saw a woman walking along the street alone, and her nose was as long as that of a witch such as he had once seen in a storybook when he was a child. Yet what a fool he was. Of course there were no witches, and of course that specific woman was not a witch. On the other hand, as he passed her he felt that at any moment she would burst out cackling and shout disgraceful things after him. Of course she couldn’t put a spell on him. Naturally not. Yet he saw her in space dancing with an imaginary illuminated broom which was like the Categorical Imperative.