The Black Halo (72 page)

‘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.

There is something else, he thought, there is. Behind the stars there is something else, behind the houses there is something else. Deep in the earth, in the remote depths of the universe, there
is something else. And it is laughing at me. It is mocking me. It is saying, Who do you think you are? It is saying, Look at that silly man with his watch, he thinks he understands it all. But I
know, I know, the thing was saying, I know differently. Deep in the roots and in space itself I AM.

And Kant saw a green snake undulating in the sky, a phantasmal shimmering snake.

And he was suddenly shaken with fear. When he held his hand out one of his fingers was trembling. He gazed at it for a long time but it didn’t stop shaking. It was like a magnetic needle
that had gone crazy.

Once he saw two small children running away after snatching a handbag from an old woman. They disappeared into the darkness as if into a den. The old woman began to weep, and Kant went up to
her, put his hand gently on her arm and said, ‘Here’s some money.’

But the old woman replied, ‘No, indeed, I’ll not take it. I have never owed anyone anything in my whole life.’

‘What, who?’ Kant muttered. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’ve never owed a penny,’ said the old woman sniffling yet indomitable. ‘I saw them. They were two girls.’

‘A girl and a boy,’ said Kant.

‘No, they were two girls,’ said the old woman resolutely. ‘They were about sixteen years old.’

‘Not more than eleven,’ said Kant. ‘I’m sure they were not more than eleven.’

‘Not at all, sixteen they were,’ said the old woman definitely.

Suddenly Kant lost his temper and shouted, ‘They were not more than eleven years old and they were both wearing red jackets.’

‘Green,’ said the old woman. ‘As sure as I’m standing here it was green they were wearing. I still have my faculties, you know.’ And she glared furiously at
Kant.

‘Green,’ she said, ‘and you must come and tell the police that.’

‘No,’ said Kant, ‘I can’t do that.’

What a fool the woman was. Of course the children had been wearing red, even allowing for the darkness. They had certainly not been wearing green. On the other hand she was one of the ones he
had heard discussing the factory. In fact, she was the woman whom he remembered as saying that such a stink should not be allowed. He turned away from her in case she would force him to go with her
to the police station; he had enough to do with his time. It seemed to him that the ground was trembling under his feet, that the universe was quivering like a morass, that perhaps it didn’t
exist at all. Why, that old woman might say that it was he who had stolen her money. He looked down at his suit, which was yellow in the light of the lamps. He seemed like a jester, a clown. He
took out his watch and consulted it: it gazed back at him, reassuringly golden and round. A tranquil moon.

‘A good time,’ he heard the voice saying seductively. And the words, ‘A good time’, echoed in his head. And at that moment he saw her again. It seemed as if she was
always there. She was smiling at him, hitching her skirt to show her thighs.

He walked towards her through the harlequin chequered night. ‘Categorical Imperative,’ said Kant restlessly in his sleep.

What is he talking about? said the young woman to herself as she examined his jacket. A poor Categorical Imperative he had been indeed. Why, he had fallen asleep like a child in her perfumed
room. She stretched herself luxuriously, feeling energy like a strong red pulse in her body. She felt complete inside her envelope of flesh; she was very conscious of her own languorous motions. At
that moment she wasn’t aware of age or of time. With money, what could one not do? One didn’t need to bother thinking about a future: the future would take care of itself. As she
watched the sleeping philosopher it angered her that he should have money and she none. Or at least he had more than she had. She had such a beautiful body, such taut pointed breasts, and his body
was not powerful or muscular at all. Ahead of her through the window she saw a single star winking in the sky. That might be Venus: she wasn’t sure. Her mother had once told her, but she
couldn’t remember things like that. She took the golden watch from his pocket. She could sell it and this poor idiot would never notice its loss, or if he did he would not complain. She knew
his kind, a respectable bourgeois to the very core.

It was early morning when he entered the maze and there were still tiny globes of dew on the grass across which he walked, leaving ghostly footprints. The old man at the gate,
who was reading a newspaper, briefly raised his head and then gave him his ticket. He was quite easy and confident when he entered: the white handkerchief at his breast flickered like a miniature
flag. It was going to be an adventure, fresh and uncomplicated really. Though he had heard from somewhere that the maze was a difficult one he hadn’t really believed it: it might be hard for
others but not for him. After all wasn’t he quite good at puzzles? It would be like any puzzle, soluble, open to the logical mind.

The maze was in a big green park in which there was also a café, which hadn’t as yet opened, and on the edge of it there was a cemetery with big steel gates, and beyond the cemetery
a river in which he had seen a man in black waterproofs fishing. The river was as yet grey with only a little sparkle of sun here and there.

At first as he walked along the path he was relaxed and, as it were, lounging: he hadn’t brought the power of his mind to bear on the maze. He was quite happy and confident too of the
outcome. But soon he saw, below him on the stone, evidence of former passage, for there were empty cigarette packets, spent matches, empty cartons of orangeade, bits of paper. It almost irritated
him to see them there as if he wished the maze to be clean and pure like a mathematical problem. It was a cool fresh morning and his shirt shone below his jacket, white and sparkling. He felt nice
and new as if he had just been unpacked from a box.

When he arrived at the first dead-end he wasn’t at all perturbed. There was plenty of time, he had the whole morning in front of him. So it was with an easy mind that he made his way back
to try another path. This was only a temporary setback to be dismissed from his thoughts. Obviously those who had designed the maze wouldn’t make it too easy, if it had been a group of
people. Of course it might only have been one person. He let his mind play idly round the origin of the maze: it was more likely to have been designed by one person, someone who in the evening of
his days had toyed idly with a puzzle of this nature: an engineer perhaps or a setter of crosswords. Nothing about the designer could be deduced from the maze: it was a purely objective puzzle
without pathos.

The second path too was a dead-end. And this time he became slightly irritated for from somewhere in the maze he heard laughter. When had the people who were laughing come in? He hadn’t
noticed them. And then again their laughter was a sign of confidence. One wouldn’t laugh if one were unable to solve the puzzle. The clear happy laughter belonged surely to the solvers. For
some reason he didn’t like them; he imagined them as haughty and imperious, negligent, graceful people who had the secret of the maze imprinted on their brains.

He walked on. As he did so he met two of the inhabitants of the maze for the first time. It was a father and son, at least he assumed that was what they were. They looked weary, and the son was
walking a little apart from the father as if he was angry. Before he actually caught sight of them he thought he heard the son say, ‘But you said it wouldn’t take long.’ The
father looked guilty and hangdog as if he had failed his son in some way. He winked at the father and son as he passed them as if implying, ‘We are all involved in the same puzzle.’ But
at the same time he didn’t feel as if he belonged to the same world as they did. For one thing he was unmarried. For another the father looked unpleasantly flustered and the son discontented.
Inside the atmosphere of his own coolness he felt superior to them. There was something inescapably dingy about them, especially about the father. On the other hand they would probably not meet
again and he might as well salute them as if they were ‘ships of the night’. It seemed to him that the father was grey and tired, like a little weary mouse redolent of failure.

He continued on his way. This too was a dead-end. There was nothing to do but retrace his steps. He took his handkerchief out of his pocket, for he was beginning to sweat. He hadn’t
noticed that the sun was so high in the sky, that he had taken so long already. He wiped his face and put his handkerchief back in his pocket. There was more litter here, a fragment of a doll, a
torn pair of stockings. What went on in this maze? Did people use it for sexual performance? The idea disgusted him and yet at the same time it argued a casual mastery which bothered him. That
people should come into a maze of all places and carry out their practices there! How obscene, how vile, how disrespectful of the mind that had created it! For the first time he began to feel
really irritated with the maze as if it had a life of its own, as if it would allow sordid things to happen. Calm down, he told himself, this is ridiculous, it is not worth this harassment.

He found himself standing at the edge of the maze, and over the hedge he could see the cemetery which bordered the park. The sun was flashing from its stones and in places he could see bibles of
open marble. In others the tombstones were old and covered with lichen. Beyond the cemetery he could see the fisherman still angling in his black shiny waterproofs. The rod flashed back from his
shoulder like a snake, but the cord itself was subsumed in bright sunlight.

And then to his chagrin he saw that there was a group of young people outside the maze and quite near him. It was they who had been the source of the laughter. One of them was saying that he had
done the maze five times, and that it was a piece of cake, nothing to it. The others agreed with him. They looked very ordinary young people, not even students, just boys from the town, perhaps six
or seven years younger than himself. He couldn’t understand how they had found the maze easy when he himself didn’t and yet he had a better mind, he was sure of that. He felt not
exactly envy of them in their assured freedom but rather anger with himself for being so unaccountably stupid. It sounded to him as if they could enter and leave the maze without even thinking
about it. They were eating chips from brown paper, and he saw that the café had opened.

But the café didn’t usually open till twelve o’clock, and he had entered the maze at half past nine. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was quarter past twelve. And then
he noticed something else, that the veins on his wrists seemed to stand out more, seemed to glare more, than he had remembered them doing. He studied both wrists carefully. No, no question about
it, his eyes had not deceived him. So, in fact, the maze was getting at him. He was more worried than he had thought.

He turned back down the path. This time something new had happened. He was beginning to feel the pressure of the maze, that was the only way that he could describe it. It was almost as if the
maze were exerting a force over him. He stopped again and considered. In the beginning, when he had entered the maze in his white shirt, which now for some reason looked soiled, he had felt both in
control of himself and the maze. It would be he who would decide what direction he would take, it would be he who would remain detached from the maze, much as one would remain detached from a
crossword puzzle while solving it in front of the fire in the evening. But there had been a profound change which he only now recognised. The maze was in fact compelling him to choose, pushing him,
making demands on him. It wasn’t simply an arrangement of paths and hedges. It was as if the maze had a will of its own.