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.
I sat trembling. After a very long time I brought myself to look at the Gaelic pages. They said in prose stronger than my English:
Joseph was a traitor. His journey was arrogant and aristocratic. We brothers believe that he betrayed us, that he hated our language and our way of life. We speak for the oppressed and inarticulate countrymen who live in the small places far from the city. We come to see him not because we wish to eat his corn but rather because we wish to destroy him utterly. He hated us, therefore we must hate him.
I listened and as I listened it was as if the whole flat came alive with sounds. These sounds it is difficult to describe. Partly they were of music that I thought I had forgotten, fragments of songs about sailing ships and men exiled from their own land. Partly they were the sounds of cows mooing on early, almost forgotten, moors. Partly they were the sounds of human voices at street corners. Partly they were voices telling stories. Partly they were my own voice heard so long ago. And the night darkened and lengthened. The curtains shivered in the draught. My mind was a mosaic of different sentences, some in English, some in Gaelic. My whole body was sweating as if with an incurable fever. I remember getting up and for no reason shifting the position of the green-faced clock on the mantelpiece. There was a dreadful coldness all around me, though the two bars of the electric fire were on. I looked at the telephone as if it were a snake about to strike. For some reason or other I thought of all the family photographs I had destroyed.
And I sat on my throne in the middle of the night. And as I sat there listening to the sound of feet on the road I clearly heard steps which seemed much more purposeful than the ones I had heard earlier on. I can’t describe why I felt this. It was something to do with the fact that the sounds made by the feet seemed to reinforce each other as if three people were walking along together, and as if they were making for a predetermined rendezvous. But at the same time the sound seemed curiously alien and echoing. The footsteps were purposeful and foreign and hollow, and they were, I was sure, making for my door. In a sudden panic I arose from my chair and pulled the bolt across the outer door, which was already locked. I don’t know why I did this since I knew that locks and bolts would not keep these beings, familiar and fatal, out. But I did it anyway and went back to my room and shut that door as well. I waited by the fire, shivering. I was alone and afraid. There was no question of that.
When I happened at that moment to glance at the page still in the typewriter, the machine began to move of its own accord. I may say at this point that I had been so terrified by all the things that had happened that I almost accepted this strange event. I had once seen a teleprinter almost supernaturally receiving messages from a different place, miles and miles away, and as I accepted that so I accepted this. The typewriter was writing in capital letters WE ARE COMING FOR YOU JOSEPH WE ARE COMING TO TAKE YOU HOME. I cannot describe the menace that these simple words seemed to contain. What did HOME mean? The grave? The words leapt out at me in their large threatening capitals. They seemed to emanate from a different world, one far from mine. And simultaneously I heard drunken voices coming from behind my door. The drunken discordant voices were singing a Gaelic song or what seemed to be one. I can’t wholly describe that song. It was, I thought, Gaelic and yet there were cadences in it of another country, an oriental country. I could almost have thought that the cadences might have been Egyptian. They were aureate and intricate and yet below them I could hear quite clearly the words of the Gaelic song, just as I had heard them many years before in my own home. It was a Gaelic song and yet the words seemed to come not through mouths but rather through snouts. I imagined at the door, just outside, three snouts raised to the moon. At the same time I sensed a menace such as one might feel – not from an animal but from a being other than animal or man, a being from another world, a world that existed long ago with its irrational gods and stiff hieratic clothes.
I stared at the door which was painted a bright yellow. My room is painted in two colours: two walls are black, the other two are yellow. When I looked at the yellow door it was as if I was looking at a screen that divided me from another world. It was as if the door was not made of wood but of a fine delicate skin which blazed with the power of the sun. And it was a skin that I knew would not survive if those beings, alive and barbarous and drunken, were to decide to burst through it. Their song was a lament and a song of triumph. It was menacing and despairing and fruitful. Suddenly, as I looked, words began to appear on the door, some in Gaelic and some in English and some in a strange language that I did not know. It was like the writing on the wall that had appeared to Belshazzar.
Then there was silence for a while. The drunken voices ceased. I knew that they were giving me time, and I did not know what I was going to do with that time they had given me. They had come down from their hills and they were waiting for me to act. They were waiting for a gesture from me. What would that gesture be? For I knew that these were not my real brothers, not the brothers I had been brought up with, not the brothers whose toys I had shared or smashed, not the brothers with whom I had bedded in that cramped house so long ago. These were other brothers. And their song was a menacing song.
I looked down at my clothes and found, to my surprise, that I was wearing not my cloak of many colours but a coat of pure yellow, the colour of the door. If I wanted to save myself I knew what I must do. Did I want to save myself? And was it only an instinct for self-protection that drove me to my action? That in itself would not be enough. No, it wasn’t wholly that, perhaps not that at all. It wasn’t just that, for as I listened I heard the Gaelic tune again, and my blood seemed to move with it, warmly and purely. I walked slowly to the door but it was as if I were dancing. A strange perfume seemed to fill the entire room. It wasn’t however the perfume of the east, it was more local perfume, such as I had smelt so long ago. It was the perfume perhaps of heatherbells, of brine. It was harsh and pure and severe and it suffused my whole body. It was a perfume that I seemed almost to remember.
As I moved towards the door the words on it changed their shape and became not fragmentary but wholly Gaelic. I knew that outside the door my brothers were waiting. I knew that I must welcome them not with hauteur but with deference. I must not be the successful Egyptian but the humbled Hebrew. I knew that it was I who was the sinner. My eyes pierced the door which was like skin and on the other side I saw my brothers broken by defeat and starvation but still human and rustic and brave. It was to them that I must offer myself, not to the alien kings and an alien land. It was to them that I must, if necessary, be the sacrifice. In the silence of the night which trembled with so many stars I walked towards the door and felt my body gain energy and power. It was as if I was a king, a real king, because I had ceased to think like one. I reached the door. It had ceased to be skin and was wood again. I opened it but there was no one there.
I looked around me. The typewriter sat on its own in the moonlight. I sat down at it in the peaceful night and began to type. The words were Gaelic and flowed easily and familiarly, as if I were speaking to my brothers who had sung drunken songs outside my door. I looked down at my clothes and f
ound that they were all one colour. I dreamed as I wrote and my dream was reflected easily in my words. I seemed to see faces, worn and lined, and they were more beautiful than any other faces I had known. I seemed to hear their language and it was their language that I wrote. It was rough and yet it was my own. It was their voices speaking through me, maimed and triumphant and without sophistication. I seemed to see the moonlight shining on the corn, ripe and yellow, the colour of the door. To their starving faces I brought joy as I wrote. And inside me was their song. I sat in my yellow robe at my yellow typewriter in the yellow room. And I was happy. I overflowed with the most holy joy.
The Incident
Why do I remember the incident so clearly, even in my fiftieth year? I throb with rage and rancour when it wells up in my mind. No, not my mind, my soul rather. It took place between my brother and me, my brother who is now at the other end of the world, in Kenya to be precise, married with five children, photographs of whom he sends regularly. The cottage where we grew up seems almost like a fairy hut in a dream, struck sometimes by thunder and lightning and at other times ringed by daisies. It has a slightly slant look and in winter time I think of it mounted by waves of snow.
And yet I don’t suppose it was like that at all. My brother was older than me and most of the time we got on well together. For instance I remember him bringing to me from the town a chocolate with twenty-four squares in it and we ate it together in the one bed, for there were only two beds in the house. Another time I remember him sitting side by side with a redhead in a house in the village, and thinking how slatternly and vulgar she looked. But of course he was much more responsible than me. I dreamed and read, and he acted. I mean he acted in the world. He was the one who scythed the corn, and gathered the peats. He was the one who took apart, the very first night, the gun he had been issued with in the Home Guard (or LDV) during the last war. Later he became an officer in the army.
My life is a string of these incidents which stick in my mind like a row of beads, lights across a bay which I have never really seen but which I continually imagine. For instance, did I imagine a Santa Claus in red hood and fur coat who visited our house? Did I imagine that I once dressed up at Hallowe’en as a beast with a green face? Probably I have imagined it all. Have I even imagined this incident? No, I don’t think so. For surely it would not return to me so often if it was purely imaginary. Anyway, I must tell you that I was a great reader of books. How often have I looked out through the dripping window panes of our cottage across to the sea which was slate grey and menacing, thinking of some book or other which I was immersed in! He, I am sure, has completely forgotten the incident even if he ever remembered it. His gaze on the contrary is fixed on the future and the ladder by which he climbs ever upward. My gaze is fixed on the past. I search for a flash from a stone or a leaf and that scrutiny is my whole life. That is why I so often return to my origins and why he has never written to any of his cousins or friends. I don’t suppose I really like him.
Sometimes I think of myself bringing two pails of water home, and I also apply this image to the artist, who brings home from wells, where the cows stare at their reflected horns, his stories and legends, making sure that not a drop spills. My brother was much more daring than me. One night we waited for him, my mother and I, as he made his way across the moor from a neighbouring village in a storm of quick bitter lightning. Yet it didn’t seem to frighten him. I could never climb to the roof of the house but he could. Even in the army he did daring things, daring direct things, because he felt the responsibility for doing them. I have always avoided responsibility.
And as I say, if I were to remind him now of this incident he wouldn’t even remember it, it is so utterly trivial. And yet isn’t it these incidents, so trivial in themselves, that we remember, that perhaps shape our destiny? We go up a road that we hadn’t intended taking and we catch a glimpse of a red dress, or a car disappearing into the distance. And these moments are defined forever, engraved indeed on our minds. I have seen that happen, often and often. For instance, not so long ago I saw a boy’s anguished face as he was taken into an ambulance whose blue light was flashing. I remember that, but I can’t remember what I read in newspapers or in journals.
As you can see, I’m trying to create a philosophy, to define the importance of the incident even though it is trivial. I have a feeling it has shaped my whole life since it always returns to me, and that puzzles me. Why should something so minute become such a perpetual nagging pain? Why should it, at moments when I am involved in thought or our ambiguous relations in the world, flash out to me so startlingly?
It was a summer morning, or at least I think it was a summer morning. I have an impression of light. On summer mornings I used to get up early and walk about the house, my feet cold on the linoleum. It was as if I was waiting for someone, some guest. Such joy, such inexpressible joy. Walking about my crooked cottage where sometimes a mouse squeaked among the barrels of meal. It is therefore a summer morning, and I am reading a book. No, it is not exactly a book, it is a magazine, it is one of those yellow magazines which have such a strange distinctive smell. To the cheap paper there clings a yellow smell, for each colour has its own smell. It is a Western. It tells the story of Wild Bill Hickok. My brother is beside me in bed and he is leaning on his elbow looking at my book. He is not reading it, he is just looking at it. And it is a summer morning full of light.
I have reached the point where Wild Bill Hickok is pursuing outlaws across a mountain range. I don’t know and I can’t remember what American state it was, it might have been Kansas or Montana. Perhaps it was Montana. Anyway the mountains are covered with sage perhaps and they are blue for it is evening. Sometimes from our own house I could see a blue mountain and in the evening the sun setting behind it. The mountain was blue changing to black and sometimes it was purple. And slowly the sun would set behind it.
Anyway my brother began to fight with me for no reason at all, simply because of an unpredictable energy which had something to do with the summer morning. I have often such strange impulses myself. For no reason. As for instance in childhood one would be walking along the road and suddenly one would break into a run, flashing one’s bare feet along the grassy verge as if one were competing against someone. But who? So he began to fight with me, no, not fight, tussle rather. And that was all it was at first, a tussle. Then as the tussle continued it became more serious, it swelled into a struggle for supremacy. We rolled over and over, each trying to get the other underneath and pinion the other’s arms so that he would lie crucified below one. And our teeth would grit themselves, and we would breathe heavily, and we would say, Do you surrender? And a lot of the time I did surrender. For I knew this was my vocation in life, to surrender. I didn’t have as much pride as my brother. And on this particular morning he tore the magazine into little pieces. Otherwise I might have been able to put it together again. But he tore it into very small pieces which drifted across the floor like snow.
And suddenly I began to cry. I remember this quite clearly. I cried and cried. And even now I almost cry when I think of it. For I was crying because I would never know what had happened to Wild Bill Hickok. I can still see him climbing the mountain in pursuit of the outlaws, his gun drawn, tall against the skyline, but I can’t see the end of the story.
Of course I know that he won, of course I know that he killed them all, but I can never be really sure since the ending of the story was torn. I can smell some plant, perhaps sage, I can see the cactus and the mountain blue in the evening, but where has Wild Bill Hickok gone? Well, he is still preparing to cross the mountain after the outlaws but he will never catch them. He is caught in mid-flight. And why should that torment me? And why in my fiftieth year should I remember the incident so vividly that it brings tears to my eyes? All I can say is that it happened. All I can say is that that yellow paper is still rank and strong in my nostrils at this very moment as across the years we can remember certain tunes which have the power to raise
for us whole areas of our past in their pristine dew and agony or happiness. I write to my brother in Kenya and congratulate him on the birth of his children but, below all that, I remember this incident. And it was so trivial that it ought not to be memorable. Yet all I can say is that if even now I could get the ending of that story on the cheap yellow paper I would give a great part of my real life in exchange for it, even the photographs of his children playing cricket, even much that I myself have endured and enjoyed and gloried in.
Listen to the Voice
For the past year he has been writing a book and for the past year he has been dying. In fact the disease, cancer of course, seems to have blossomed in harmony with the progression of the book. He will not show it to me till it is finished. It is a book about existentialism: Sartre, Camus, and the rest. He has been reading them thoroughly for many years in his spare time as a French teacher in the school where I myself taught. I have retired, in the natural order of things, and he has retired because of his illness though he has been keeping up a gay battle to the end. I have not been surprised by this. He has always been a man of immense intelligence and courage, a rare combination. I have known for years that his marriage was not a happy one (his wife did not understand his passion for research). She is a very ordinary common woman from England and he should never have married her. They met, I think, when he was at Oxford in the first dew of his youth. (At that time I believe that he was a dedicated left winger, anti-Franco, and the rest of it. The transition from left wing politics towards absurdity must show something about his life.) He has had to put up with a lot from her, not simply indifference but active malevolence and petty spitefulness. I have seen him humiliated by her in company though he smiled all the time. The humiliations were constant and searching, and might take the form of suggesting that he had not done as well as he should have done financially, or even of questioning his intelligence (he was not very practical), or of perfectly placed stab wounds with regard to money. When I have visited him I have treated her strictly as an enemy in whose custody a prisoner happens to be. She hates me as much as she hates him and for the same reasons, that I am like her husband in that I genuinely do not care for material things, I cannot understand why people should need more than one simple meal at a time. In fact the two of us have been unpopular with the staff of the school because at a certain meeting called to discuss possible strike action we spoke up against the greed of the society in which we live. Naturally we failed to persuade our colleagues to adopt our principles (they genuinely seemed to think we were cranks since we talked of money as being a superficial gloss), but our stand didn’t make us popular. Simmons in particular was our bitter foe. He is a devious though apparently bluff fellow who is not only his own worst enemy but everyone else’s as well. I cannot tolerate his hyprocrisy, and he has the scorned woman’s ability to strike neatly at the underbelly.
The Black Halo Page 14
