The Black Halo (70 page)

He was aware of a man who was joking in a loud voice to his friends in the adjacent carriage. He seemed to have an immense fund of stories. ‘When I was in the army,’ he said,
‘we were prevented from going to church on a Sunday by this corporal. So I hit him. I pushed his head into a barrel of water, and they sent me to Colchester. There I had to run everywhere
between two policemen. I thought the most Christian thing was to hit him so that he would let us go to church,’ and he laughed. ‘I never liked authority much, but I’ll tell you
that corporal was sent to Easter Island after that. They got rid of him.’

He had many other stories, some of which involved playing practical jokes on a strict aunt of his.

And the train raced on. Sometimes there would be white men standing on the platforms, sometimes a Negro reading
The Times,
or an Indian reading a book. In another carriage he heard two
philosophers arguing, one maintaining that children’s programmes were the best on television. ‘I never miss any of them,’ he said. ‘ “Jackanory” is my favourite
one.’ His fellow philosopher gazed at him in horror. A tall man with a very narrow head talked about structuralism. Someone else compared
Treasure Island
with Marx’s
Das
Kapital.
He used the word ‘precisely’ a lot. He would say, ‘It is precisely Squire Trelawney who is the most important person in the book.’

An African who spoke with an Oxford accent complained about his son. ‘I told him if he didn’t like the food he could leave the house.’

Time passed and he clutched his ticket more tightly. Some of the stations showed clocks which had stopped. Their faces blank and empty. There was a smell of mortality on the train. The evening
was falling and he felt that his destination was approaching. He took his case down from the rack, excited by the thought. It was about another hour, however, before the train came to a gliding
stop. On the platform were a number of soldiers wearing helmets which looked grey in the fading light.

‘Come,’ they said. ‘Follow us.’

He grew more and more excited. At least something was happening. A gun was put in his hand and he found himself firing it indiscriminately into the crowds which were pouring from the train.
People fell onto the platform, writhing with pain. He wanted to feel the pain. It seemed to him that he had read about people like himself who were perfectly happy doing what he was doing. Bang,
bang went the gun and more and more people fell down. It was all very banal; there seemed no connection between his gun and their act of falling down. The world didn’t change much, that was
the extraordinary thing. Pop, pop went the gun and there was this contingent but not necessary flowering of blood. It was all quite ordinary. Even death was a cheat and didn’t seem tragic or
interesting at all. He opened his mouth and began to howl like a wolf. He jabbed sharp pins into his eyes till blood spurted down his beard. He jabbed and jabbed at his eyes while the train hissed
behind him and he was enveloped in a cloud of sighing steam.

The survivor stood among the debris. There passed by him a ragged line of refugees with their possessions in carts. They stared straight ahead of them. Houses were burning, ash
was being blown by a small dry wind.

The survivor stood perfectly still. He passed his hand across his body to test if he was really there. Yes, he was intact, and there was no blood on him. A jet screeched across the sky leaving a
thin line behind it. He touched the back of his neck where the hat had left a hot sweaty mark. It seemed to him that the trail left by the jet and the mark on the back of his neck were related in
some way.

As he watched the refugees he wondered why he was still alive. Their carts had red wheels: they were carrying their bloodied household gods with them. Why were they going from one place to
another? It would be the same everywhere, wouldn’t it? The whole world would surely vibrate with din, with pain.

He stared down at the headless body of a child. It seemed as obvious and as unusual as a stone. The ruin seemed normal, he could hardly remember when it had been otherwise. There had been
soldiers racing about in trucks in their olive-green uniforms. They had taken out guns and shot people and then they had raced away again. They barked orders as if they knew exactly what they were
doing, what they wanted. In situations like this it was perhaps best if one knew what one was doing.

Why me, he asked the sky above him. Why was I selected? And the question was unanswerable. There were millions and millions of people in the world and he had survived. He rubbed his face. It was
still there. The headless body of the child didn’t trouble him now as it did before. At least you are dead, he thought, you will have no further decisions to make – if you ever made
any. He himself found it hard to make decisions. Why should he head north rather than south, west rather than east?

But in fact he found that he was heading west, away from the sun. For no reason that he could think of. He came across a tank lying on its side amongst a bank of flowers. It seemed as if the
flowers were growing out of the tank. He stared at it for a long time, considering. Some lines came into his head:

The green tank grew among flowers while the sun shone blindly. But he didn’t pursue the poem.

In the distance he could hear the sound of guns, thump after thump. Subconsciously he had walked away from them and that was why he was heading west.

I am a survivor, he thought, there must be a reason for that. Look at all the people who have been shot, bludgeoned to death, hacked, bombed . . . and here am I, alive.

He had taken off his hat and thrown it in a ditch. He was not recognisable as belonging to any side, any party. Blandly the sun shone blue above him. It was exactly the same as on the morning
before all the attacks began.

He proceeded on his way, since there was nothing else to do. A big fat man with documents in his hand was running about shouting. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is my visa. Everything
is in order.’ He stared into the survivor’s eyes as if pleading with him. ‘Tell me that I have done the right thing.’ The survivor turned away. The fat man was weeping,
turning out his pockets, offering him money. He thinks I am in charge, thought the survivor.

A week ago he had been sitting in a class in the open being lectured to by soldiers in olive-green uniforms. They had told him and others that they must learn to change their attitudes, support
the regime. There were a lot of flags.

And then this class had been attacked out of the sky, and there was no one to tell him what he should do or what regime he should belong to. All around him now was a silence which palpitated
with fear and hatred.

He stared into the mouth of an open cannon. He went up to it and examined it. Its mouth was big, as if it would swallow him. Its body was shiny. He stroked it absently. He noticed that it was
now cold. Its blunt solidity gave it a better right to be there than he had. It was fixed and unwavering in its place.

He saw white flowers in the hedges. They also were more authoritative than he was in his white shirt. They frothed and foamed with the life that was in them. They too extended their empire.

Below him on the ground he saw a snail with its aerials extended. He banged his foot on the ground in front of it and it came to a halt. Poor snail, he thought. You hear something but you
don’t know what it is. I shouldn’t really be banging the ground like this, frightening you. The snail was velvety black. Its aerials were its only defences.

He walked on, leaving the snail behind him. In the distance he could see flames rising and falling, but there was no noise coming from them. People were burning among these flames, jumping out
of windows perhaps, but there was only the silence. And he touched himself again: yes, I am here. My stomach has not been gutted, I have not been beheaded, though I have seen many beheaded with
great curved swords. Who are these people who behead others? What kind of people are they? Maybe they don’t realise what they are doing. Maybe they don’t think as I do. Maybe they
can’t imagine what it’s like to be beheaded, to suffer pain. Maybe they are burning with faith. I, on the contrary, have no faith at all. Maybe it is better to have faith and behead
people than to have no faith at all. It is hard for me to feel the reality of things. Maybe the stones will shift and move eventually like clouds.

He remembered in the class a little man who had stared at him vindictively as if he hated him. What have I done to that man? he asked himself. The man had hit him across the face and prodded him
with a bayonet. The bruise was still on his cheek. Why had the small busy man done that? He couldn’t understand it. And yet the hatred had been as palpable as stench. Maybe he himself had a
smell to which the soldier had responded with enmity. A smell of nothingness, of unreality.

He came to a fragment of wall. Set in the wall there was a face, a Roman face, arrogant and haughty. The face stared out at him with dazzling cruelty as if he weren’t there. The eyes were
cold, empty. The head was proud, indifferent. It was like the face of an emperor. He touched the eyes gently, but not before he had seen some small busy animal running out of the wall and across
what appeared to be an empty courtyard.

He came to a grassy verge along which he walked. He stopped when he saw a small blue flower there. He touched it gently as he had touched the sculptured face. It was tiny, beautiful,
hermit-like. It was saying: I wish to be alone, quiet, studious. Its petals were indescribably soft. That was how I used to be, thought the survivor. I had my books, my teaching, my poetry. That
was exactly how I was. He smiled at the small blue flower; for the moment, this was the reality. Its coolness comforted him. It was as if he had returned to a world before warfare, before secrecy.
What a tiny flower which had somehow survived, like himself. It was like a mirror of himself. Beauty is secrecy, he thought – yet I wonder. It is too late for the blue flower. The blue flower
is a lie.

And he was about to tear it out of the ground. He stretched his hand forward and touched it. It could not be allowed to live in such an illusion. He knelt before it in a predatory manner. At
that precise moment there was an explosion – a big red flower blazing above him, about him. The mine must have been there all the time without his noticing it, mocking him. The world exploded
in rays like one of the wheels of the carts carrying the old useless gods.

The child gazed at me from the doorway, his eyes innocent as the sky. His head was alive with curls: he looked like a cherub in a picture by an Italian painter. Beside him was
a little girl who suddenly stood up, climbed on the piano stool, and began to bang the keys. She looked as demented as a real pianist.

‘We’ll have to be going to the funeral,’ said my wife. I agreed. The child’s father, who was our son, put on his black tie while the child stared at him with the same
innocent round eyes. His father lifted his son on to his shoulders: the child screamed with delight, pulling at his father’s tie.

We drove to the church. The coffin lay at the front. The minister, who was a young man with a beard, said, ‘There is no death: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In my father’s
house are many mansions and if it were not so I would have told you.’

The man in the coffin was a relative of ours. In his life he had been generous and courageous: he had died in hospital from cancer bravely borne. Now he was at peace.

The child stood in the sunlight which flickered around him. He touched the little girl wonderingly and then moved away from her, staring at us, his thumb in his mouth. She found a can in a box
and began to bang it on the floor. Neither of them could talk much.

The minister intoned words from the Bible. The dead man’s wife came in and sat in the front flanked by her daughter and son-in-law who both looked serious. Her relatives were big men from
the island, strong, and robust. They sat in a row behind her. ‘How handsome they are,’ my wife whispered. Big men, solid and strong: they came from the island and ate good food and
worked hard and were not sensitive. It seemed to me that they looked like big stones which had stood on a moor since the beginning of time.

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.’