The Black Halo (86 page)

Redundant. What a word. As if it was being withdrawn from circulation like a flawed coin: leaving a space where he had been.

What was he going to do about money? Celia would say relentlessly. My pension will be made up, he had answered. After all, he was fifty-five (Celia was forty-two). He wondered sometimes if she
had been seeing other men when he was working at the university: there had been periods of jealousy but he had never found any evidence. At sherry parties she was always bright and witty: he had
been proud of her for he himself had no small talk.

The desolate world he had studied, of battles, fights, exile, wanderings, had there been redundancy there? Of course there had been. Poets wrote of deserted halls, of festivities which had
suddenly ceased, of silent harps. And that was how he felt. Abandoned. Stricken.

It had been a cosy would which he had inhabited in the university while it lasted. He loved the students, and they realised it, though he had never been able to communicate with them outside his
subject. And of course they weren’t all that fond of the subject anyway, they had considered it a pedantic compulsion which was rather unfair. The language stood up in front of them like a
field of thorns. But sometimes on gifted days he felt he had given them a hint of its resonance, of its concept of endurance. Endure, endure, if nothing can be changed. Endure the violence of
battle. Stand there till you are cut down. Once he had said (he thought wittily) to them, it prepares you for the Thatcherite world.

He knew Celia would leave him. She was the child of a more clear-headed world than his own. And anyway she wouldn’t be able to take her wounded husband to see the family. She had put up
with him long enough. He knew she could be merciless, and loved status: as time passed she would become even more bitter because of her desperation. She would have to make the leap soon. Perhaps
without his knowing it she was making the leap even now.

The snow was very thick, its complex flakes drifting hypnotically before his eyes. He thought he should switch on the second bar of the electric fire but decided against it. The bar that was on
looked red and raw like a newly opened wound.

As a matter of fact there had been a number of suicides already. People had settled into a nest and had been asked to leave it. It was too hard for them to start again, it was impossible.

He and Celia slept in different rooms now. He didn’t get to sleep till he had read for a long while. Had he been betrayed by his subject? Should he have read something else, explored some
other field? But sometimes he was comforted by these wanderers, seafarers, exiles.

Endure, endure, endure to the end. The monster is searching for you in your lighted house. The mouth and claws are seeking for weakness in your walls. The bodies dripping blood are lying in the
snow. Night falls and you are waiting for the monster. He is heaving his malicious body along, he has come out of the depths: he is crusted with seaweed. He will drag you down to the bottom of the
sea where you must fight for your life.

And what, my friend, will you do then? Will you put up your pension like a shield?

Power seeps away from you: and respect. You will be always on the edge of things, listening. No one will pay any attention to you: your words aren’t backed by even a tiny measure of power.
If you have a lot of power you can afford clichés. If you haven’t you must be witty.

He knew that Celia would leave him. She was like the bird that would set off in spring over the waste of waters. It was not her style to stay with the wounded. She was not one for the long haul
of endurance. Already he could sense the inattention in her, as if she was feeling the stirring of her last spring. She must launch herself out soon, or die. It was quite natural really.

If he had the energy he would launch out and leave his bereaved furniture as well. But he didn’t have the energy. The university had been his lord: without his lord he was doomed,
disorientated. Without that steady walk to his room every morning. And the new lord obviously had no time for him. The new lord was brisk and competent, an entrepreneur, salesman. The new lord had
the indefinable quality of hope. He himself had lived too long in the castle, listening to the seductive harp music.

In a short time she would leave him, she would walk into the snow with her case (though before that she would have found someone to replace him). His philosophy of endurance had been overtaken
by events. There were stirrings around him, wings were being tested. The philosophy of endurance did not itself endure.

A new world was breaking out around him, of salesmanship, of opportunism. Birds were flying everywhere with their beaks, greedy exotic birds, seeking for food with opportunistic instinct. His
nest had been raided by the cuckoo, the bird of spring, the source of whose voice was invisible.

It was a world in which Celia might thrive.

He looked out at the snow. Maybe he should draw the curtains.

No, he told himself with a sudden burst of energy. I must not do that, I must watch, I must not hide. I shall watch it out to the end. I owe myself that. I owe myself a seat in the theatre of
nature, however painful.

And when she leaves me I must endure that too.

It is the least that my special subject can give me.

I imagine this Israeli soldier in his olive-green uniform standing by himself on the Golan Heights. The battle has just finished. With half a dozen tanks the positions were
held till the reserves were called up. These included David, Saul, Abraham and many other great Jews, for history is in the present as well as in the past. This Israeli soldier forms in front of
his own eyes the history of his people, Joseph and his coloured coat, Abraham, Isaac, Moses and the general who actually entered the Promised Land. It was Joshua who aligned the guns and used the
field glasses. The Syrians were in fact Philistines, Germans, Assyrians.

It is morning. The land is silent, the dew is falling gently on the grass. He can almost hear it falling. There is a spectral quality about the morning light. The tanks lie in the mist like
stranded beasts.

God was with them again, history was with them again. God was in the concentration camps too. At one time he demanded sacrifices, now he demands morality, discipline. It is better to be ethical
than to offer sacrifices in smoke and fire. God followed them however in symbolic fire and cloud. The concentration camps had meaning, even the children’s shoes lying on top of each other in
the Holocaust Museum had meaning.

I fought for my country, for the True Land, thought the Israeli soldier. I am proud of what I have done. This is my predestined country. I have not let my people down, he thought in the spectral
light. God is with us, who then can be against us? Even the long years in Babylon had meaning. The world blazes with the presence of God.

But the spectral light troubled him and the bodies of the enemy troubled him, especially of one of them who was young, and at whose breast a rose of blood faded. His face had a severe purity. It
was like a face he had once seen in a painting.

The Israeli soldier turned away. The tanks were spectral in the light. The army had held out till help came. Everyone was involved in the common battle, with the historically dead and the
living. He had seen Joshua waving them on. His face had flashed among the maps. They were invincible: even the Romans had learnt that when the Jews had killed each other at Masada rather than
surrender.

His eyes returned to the Syrian whose proud dignified face troubled him. The boy was about his own age. It was as if he was looking at himself. Consider how free of ideological ardours a body is
in the spectral light of dawn.

A thought struck him thunderously. If everything that happened was God, then God was the same as history. If the concentration camps and victories were the same in God’s sight, then God
was only another name for history. If one praised the concentration camps, the exiles, then one was only praising history.

He stood there shivering in the gathering light. God . . . history. Then there was no need for God at all. He put his hands to his head. Where had the evil thought come from? Was it the work of
the Devil? No, the light wasn’t getting stronger. The mist was was still swirling about the ground. And yet he could see a red sun through the mist, a raw red sun, the temporal face of God.
If all events were important or unimportant God was only another name for Time, for History.

He shook in the suddenly cold morning.

We have been betrayed, he thought. The concentration camps happened. So did this victory. If we had lost, the event would still have been praised: it would still have been God’s holy work.
History and defeat are the same in the ideological enigma that has always been propounded. Joy and sorrow are the same. If this victory is equal to defeat what follows? God therefore is archaic, a
superfluous quantity.

The young dead swart face stared up at him. It was a flower like the flowers that surrounded it. If we had not committed suicide at Masada, if instead we had surrendered, that too would have
been considered God’s will.

The electronic fence surrounds us. If the nose of a dog touches it, we know of it. The mines around our feet flower. Joseph lived in Egypt, became an Egyptian and saved his brothers. His
dazzling robe was bright and terrible. It glowed with an infernal duplicity.

There they were together, the Israeli and the Palestinian soldiers. In death they did not seem so different. They seemed pure and inviolable. They were lying in all sorts of positions, some had
one arm, some had one leg, some had torn breasts. There was no ideology here, only silence.

He looked down as if he was examining the pages of some holy book. But these pages yielded nothing. Questions and answers, they were all the same. The bodies did not suffer, they simply
were.

The sun was reddening and reddening. It was no longer God’s head. It was simply the sun. It was not spiritual power, it was a combination of heat and gases. The land was not symbolic at
all. It was simply grass and stone and flowers, tanks and dead bodies. It was history, event, it had no authority.

He passed his hand over his eyes. It was almost as if he was about to fall down, so dizzy he felt. He sat among the bodies and watched them. But they remained inflexibly as they were. The sun
was solid in the sky and he felt heat on his shoulders. Time was itself and history. Ideology did not know of these shadows and these guns. He put his hand out and touched the face of the Syrian
soldier. It was not as cold as he had thought it would be. Changed forever, he sat among the dead bodies, each different from each other, the more minutely he examined them. The mist had moved away
from them and showed them exactly as they were, unique, dignified and devastatingly individual.

Sometimes she believed that her son was simply lying, at other times she was not so sure. He didn’t look like a liar, there was nothing furtive about him when he was
telling his stories, but he did seem to dream a great deal. It was as if he wasn’t quite of the common earth. Perhaps that was why he was called the Lark by the other boys; they had seized on
this unworldliness and his flights of fancy. His latest story however was rather odd. He had come in and asked her casually whether there had been a funeral that day.

‘No’, she said, though her own dress looked funereal enough.

‘That’s funny,’ he said.

‘Why should it be funny?’ she asked. Her hands were white with the flour she had been using for baking.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘There is,’ she said, ‘or you wouldn’t have asked.’ Was this another lie, another flight? These lies, if they were lies, worried her for she had been brought up to
tell the direct truth.

Sometimes however he didn’t want to tell her and she had to force what she thought was the truth out of him. Already it seemed as if he regretted his question. But she wouldn’t
rest.

‘Well, what is it then? Why do you think there might have been a funeral?’ She would get to the bottom of this, she wouldn’t leave it alone.

‘It was just . . . ’ he said,

‘Just what?’

‘I thought I saw . . . what looked like a funeral. Only it couldn’t have been a funeral.’

‘Why not?’

‘They weren’t wearing black.’

‘Who?’

‘The people.’

‘What people?’

‘The people carrying the . . . ’

‘Coffin, you mean.’

There was a pause.

‘Do they always wear black, mother?’

‘Of course they always wear black,’ she said. ‘What would you expect them to wear?’

‘Yes, only they . . . ’

‘Only they what?’

‘They were wearing sort of tunics.’

‘Tunics?’

‘Yes, like . . . You see them in books. They were red and green. And they were wearing pointed hats. Yellow.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘That’s what they were wearing,’ he insisted stubbornly.

‘Who?’

‘The people at the funeral. And the . . . coffin was red.’

‘What on earth? Where did you see this?’

‘At the brae. They were close as . . . just next to me. They never looked.’

‘It was your imagination. Who ever heard of a red coffin? And people wearing pointed hats at funerals. It’s all these books you read. You must have seen it in a book.’

‘They were just next to me. I knew one of them.’

‘Who?’

‘I knew Calum Mor. And I think it was Angusan.’

‘What a liar you are,’ she said.

‘I’m not, I’m not,’ he screamed.

‘Or you dreamed it then. Perhaps you fell asleep and dreamed it.’

‘I didn’t dream it.’

But she was relentless.

‘Well, then it couldn’t have been a funeral. It must have been something else. Maybe you saw a circus.’ And she laughed.

‘There was a coffin,’ he said. ‘And it was red. And they were all wearing these clothes.’

‘A red coffin,’ she said. ‘Who ever heard of a red coffin?’

‘I saw it,’ he said. ‘I did see it.’