The Black Halo (29 page)

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.

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.