The Black Halo (17 page)

However, let me say that when I was old enough I left the Highlands and came to Edinburgh and began to write stories and novels in English. I left the Gaelic world wholly behind me, because I
suppose I despised it. If you ask me why I despise it it is partly because of these silly ghost stories and partly because of the simple unsophisticated mode of life of those people whom I have
little affection for. In fact when I was growing up they seemed to laugh at me. I have even written articles attacking that placid unchanging world which knows nothing of Kafka or Proust or the
other great writers of the world. I would never go back there now, so I live in my untidy flat in Edinburgh seeing very few people and working at my books, some of which have been published. I have
set none of them, I may say, in the Highlands. After all, what important insight could I get from there, from people and a culture which have not moved into the twentieth century?

All was going well until recently when one night, working on a book about Joseph and his brothers – after all, I don’t see why Thomas Mann should be the only person who is allowed to
write about the Bible – I came down to the living-room where I had left my typewriter. I remembered quite clearly at which point I had stopped writing. Joseph was standing in astonishment
gazing at the pyramids and comparing them to the hills of home and, exiled in a strange land, feeling very small against that hewn stone. The moonlight was shining on my typewriter making it look
like a yellow skeleton against the window. I switched on the light and picked up the pages which I had typed. I began to read them, remembering in my mind, insomniac and restless, the cadences
which I had aimed for and which I thought I had achieved. However, with an astonishment as great as Joseph’s when he was regarding the pyramids, I suddenly found that I was reading
Gaelic.

Now there is absolutely no question but these pages had been written in English. I had spent too long over the words not to know that. However, as I read these Gaelic sentences, rougher and more
passionate than my English ones, I had a strange feeling that I had read them before somewhere. I stood there astonished in the silence. There was no sound in any of the other flats or on the
street outside. I looked carefully round my now brightly-lit room but it seemed exactly the same as when I had gone to bed. My Penguins were arranged carefully round the walls, and my typewriter
was on the table. I stared at the pages knowing that I must be going out of my mind. But I was absolutely certain that though these pages were familiar I had not written them. They seemed to be
saying in Gaelic that Joseph had abandoned his land for another land and that in doing so he had betrayed his own. Someone must have typed these pages but who could that someone have been?

No living human being could have entered the flat and certainly no one could have typed the pages without my hearing them. On the other hand, no one could have typed them and brought them into
the flat as a practical joke. I am very fearful and I lock the windows, and the door is always locked. But not only that, my English pages had disappeared. Whoever had done this had not simply
translated the original pages, but had rather substituted his Gaelic pages for my English ones. And yet since that person was not me it must have been some spiritual being; in other words a ghost.
I felt for the first time a draught as of cold air all round me even in the bright electric light. I went to the door but it was still locked. I switched on all the lights in every room but they
were undisturbed and the windows were all locked as I had left them.

I came back to the room and stood looking down at the Gaelic pages. They were even written on the same kind of quarto paper as I had used myself and the typing was not unlike mine. But it was
slightly different, the touch was lighter and surer. There were fewer erasures. The cold wind did not go away. I felt threatened as if some being whose name and form I did not know understood all
about me and was determined to destroy me.

I made coffee and stayed up all night, I was too frightened to go to bed. I went and got my red and green dressing gown and sat by the electric fire, though I could ill afford to waste all that
electricity. But there was nothing else that I could do. I listened to the silence, terrified that that ghostly being would return and type while I sat there. What was I going to do? Carefully I
put the case back on the typewriter and stared at it as if hypnotised. I was afraid that I would fall asleep and that the ghost would type more while I sat transfixed there like a mummy. But
nothing happened and when morning dawned sickly and pale I looked again at the pages. They were still in Gaelic. My English ones had irretrievably disappeared.

The following day I summoned up enough courage to burn the Gaelic pages and start again on my English version. I re-typed as far as I could remember what I had already done and went on to
describe the sophisticated world of Egypt. I knew little about the country but imagined the kind of civilisation that would have produced those vast inhuman monuments. I invented a slave market at
which Joseph was sold, I wrote about himself and Potiphar’s wife. I may say that I had difficulty here since my sexual experiences have been limited and I know whom to blame for that. At five
o’clock, satisfied with my work, I made some coffee and at that moment I heard it.

The sound was coming from the next room where I keep my record player. It was the voice of a well-known Gaelic singer and she was singing a song about the murder of a younger brother by an older
one. I rushed into the room, spilling my coffee as I went. There was the record player plugged in and there was the record which I’d never seen in my life spinning on its black circuit. I
switched the machine off and removed the record. Though I had never seen it, I had of course understood the words. I passed my hand across my brow and put the record down on the floor. I closed the
cover of the record player and sat there dismally in the dull afternoon whose light was already fading from the sky. I didn’t know what to do. I could have gone out to see a film or a play
but I didn’t fancy coming back to my flat in the middle of the night. I switched on all the lights again. I heard no one moving about the room. My jazz and classical records were still in
their places. I trembled with fear and anguish.

Suddenly I rushed back into the room where I had left my latest English pages. I picked them up. They were all in Gaelic and without erasure. I read them with horror. They said that Joseph had
been condemned to death and was lying in prison waiting for the end. This too, of course, was in the story. After all, it is one of the great stories of the world. My mother had told it to me many
years before in a voice of rigour and appalling judgment. But since then I had read Thomas Mann.

I saw him quite clearly sitting in prison, the light about him dim and grey and his face quite blank. It was as if he was a white page waiting to be written on. All around him was Egypt which he
had learned to love and whose language he spoke. I saw the walls of the prison and written on them were graffiti in a language which might have been Egyptian since they did not appear to be
composed of any language that I had ever seen. He was dressed in his coat of many colours.

I sat dully at the typewriter with these pages in my hand. They were strong, powerful pages, in fact better than mine, simpler and perhaps cruder. It’s difficult to explain why they were
so much better, but I think it must have been because their language was less abstract. They seemed to have caught the intonation of a language that Joseph might have used, perhaps Hebrew, perhaps
Egyptian. They even incorporated the words of the song I had heard on the record player. If I had had somewhere to go I would have rushed out that moment on to the street. But I had no friends in
Edinburgh. Its vast stony houses were anonymous enough for me to be able to write among them in privacy, but they were not places for friendship. I stared at the light draining out of the sky and I
was more frightened than I had ever been in my whole life, or rather I was frightened in a different way from that in which I had been frightened before. I felt like a statue which was also
trembling. I made more coffee and kept all the lights on but I was on edge, as if waiting for a fresh incursion into my life which I had thought orderly. I waited there helplessly, as a cow waits
to be poleaxed. I remembered seeing that once back in the Highlands and I had hated it. Now I was the victim myself in all that bright light. I knew I would have to stay up again all night. I would
be frightened to lie in my bed among the cold stiff blankets, waiting for the dawn to appear. And as I waited I knew that some spirit was moving about me, determined to destroy me. I put the last
page of the Gaelic script in the typewriter as if I was propitiating an angry god. And I sat there like that for a long time, shivering though the fire was warm.

It must have been about seven o’clock at night that I suddenly felt a terrible anger with whatever malevolent being was about me. The curtains were drawn, the electric fire was on, there
was lots of light. Suddenly I took the Gaelic pages out of the typewriter, screwed them up and threw them into the wastepaper basket. I knew exactly why I had done this. I knew that I must not
surrender at this point or I would surrender forever. Why should I allow this being, whatever it was, to tell me what I ought to do, how I ought to write? I was only doing what I thought I ought to
be doing. Did I not have free will? What law stated that some ghost or other from another world should command my mind? The anger I felt was pure and ardent and innocent. If I wished to abandon my
homeland, if that was what I was doing, why should I not do so? Indeed, in doing so was I not being an exception? Was I not in fact setting out to create a new being? That is, the exile who is able
to speak from another land and in another language? I had been betrayed by my own land. What therefore did I owe it? I too had been mocked by my own brothers, if I could call them that. Well then,
let me stay in my Egypt. Let me adopt it as my promised land. Let my ambitions be fructified there. After all, wasn’t Egypt the pinnacle of achievement? And in Egypt could I not gather my
corn together and feed my rustic brothers who came down there from my own lost land? What was wrong with that? Wasn’t that what the Joseph story taught, that the murderous brothers were
dependent after all on the dreamer who lived in another and more powerful country?

So, out of my pure anger, I tore the Gaelic pages out of the typewriter and threw them into the wastepaper basket. And I waited. That’s precisely what I did. I waited. I knew that
something would happen though I did not know what it would be. I was frightened, yes, but I was angry too and the clean wash of my anger anaesthetised for a while my fear, at least as long as I
could hear people passing on the street in my adopted city. I listened to those feet passing and I felt in my own country. I even summoned up enough strength to start typing again in English. I
wrote how Joseph left the prison because he was able to interpret the dreams of the baker and the butler. I thought of myself as Joseph, the dreamer who had such great powers.

And the night passed and became more silent. Once I had to leave the room where my typewriter was and go to the bathroom. For a second, as I opened the door, I thought I saw a figure in white
flashing past me, but I decided that it probably was an illusion. It seemed to me that the figure was dressed in a white robe which had an oriental look about it. But, as I have said, I decided
that it must have been an illusion. Not an illusion however was the intense cold I felt as I left the room and all the time I was in the bathroom. And worse was when leaving the bathroom I looked
in the mirror and saw my own face there. It seemed demonic and lined and white. I could hardly recognise myself. It was as if I was waiting for something to happen, something devilish and
horrifying. I went back to the room, trembling again, and when I did so I saw that the pages in the typewriter were written once more in Gaelic.

I withdrew my eyes from the pages as if afraid that they contained sentences which would destroy me. My English pages had again disappeared. I looked down at my hands, wondering perhaps if I
myself was the author of what was happening to me. But I could learn nothing from them. They looked innocent and bland. I looked at the clock. It said eleven. The noises on the street seemed to
have stopped and there was an oppressive air of waiting about the flat. I went right through it and checked that every light was switched on. I waited as if listening for songs but I heard nothing.
I went back and sat down again in my chair which seemed to have turned into a gaunt throne. Was I indeed Joseph, sitting in that alien chair? The wood on which I sat seemed to be rotting as if
small animals were eating into it. There were the marks of teeth. I saw in my hand cows eating each other, cornstacks devouring one another. I was afloat on the river of time. I can’t tell
the visions I saw that night. It was as if I was in the centre of Egypt and there were snakes and cats all round me. They opened their mouths, and their teeth and fangs snapped at me. The throne or
chair tottered. The furniture swayed. The pages seemed to turn into tablets, solid and white.

Suddenly I thought, what if the story of Joseph could have a different ending? And I was terrified. After all, I hadn’t believed in the Bible, or had thought of it only as fiction. Well,
if it were fiction, then alternatives were possible. Who was this Joseph anyway but an arrogant fellow who thought that he was better than his brothers? Wasn’t that the case? Weren’t
the brothers justified in getting rid of him? I hadn’t thought of that before, and yet wasn’t that what the Gaelic typed pages had been telling me? If that were so, then the Joseph
story could be turned inside out. Joseph had deserved everything he had got. He had deserved his Egypt. I imagined outside my room the tall stone buildings as if they were pyramids. Inside them
were all the buried kings, the tyrants and despots. He had joined them. He had taken his robe down to Egypt and seen it encrusted with gold before his eyes. He had entered that alien time and
place.