The Black House

7

It came to him, what she had said on their first day at The Yew Tree; he forgot what preceded it or prompted it, but her words “You know nothing” had swiped at him. And he remembered how he had changed the subject, heading her off with, “What do you mean by saying I’m ridiculous?”

He was not defeated then, he knew how she exaggerated, and he did the same—the precise managing of exaggeration, on which was pinned a timid sincerity, was a convention of their marriage. They didn’t say what they meant, but this manner suggested all that was unsaid. It was an English trait which Africa had intensified almost to the point of parody. They had met by chance, and almost resenting the love they called a deep sympathy so as not to feel foolish, they had married late—Munday was forty, Emma two years older (she had money: it had made her shy, nearly kept her single)—so Africa, which Munday studied and Emma endured, was their honeymoon. Their African isolation had thrown them together, like new cellmates who, once solitaries, learn in a confinement where they are robbed of privacy to protect themselves from greater violation. They had come to each other with a single similarity, a perverse kind of courage each saw in the other but not in himself. That, and an irrational thing—though at the time it seemed like conclusive proof of a common vision—their discovery one evening in idle talk of a fascination they shared for that polished Aztec skull of rock crystal in the Ethnography Section of the British Museum. “There’s only one thing in the world I care about,” Emma had said. Munday had almost scoffed, but when she disclosed it he was won over and from that moment he loved her. They had seen it as schoolchildren and returned to it as adults. It hadn’t been moved; it was still in the center of the aisle, in the high glass case, mounted on blue velvet. It was like an image of their common faith, the carved block of crystal in the dustiest room of the museum, the cold beauty of the blue shafts, sparkling behind the square teeth in the density of that death’s head. Emma said that she had whispered to it—Munday didn’t ask what—and that it was so perfect it made her want to cry. Munday said it was the highest art of an advanced people and he told Emma its cultural origins; but he venerated it no less than she.

Later, married and in Africa, they discovered how opposed they were, but this opposition, their differences with their determined sympathy, gave a soundness to their marriage. Munday had a vulgar streak that Emma’s primness sustained and even encouraged. Munday blustered and was rash; in a professional argument with a younger colleague he would tab his finger intimidatingly at the man and say, “I won’t wear it.” Anyone interested in his work he saw as a poacher. His colleagues said he was impossible and shortly he had no colleagues. He had a reputation for arrogance, and very early in his career he had learned an elderly trick of blustering, pressing his lips together and blowing out his cheeks and prefacing an outrageous remark with something offensive, “Damn it, are you too stupid to see—” Marriage only made his anger blind: he had Emma, and if he went too far he did so because he knew how his wife could draw him back. He might rage, but it was her sensibility that he trusted, not his own. He protested loudly but secretly he believed in her strength, and that belief in her timely sarcasm gave him strength. He relied on her in all ways, to pay for his research when his grant was exhausted, to support his temper and defend his opinions. His science he knew was opinion, full of guesses that made him sound crankish, and she mocked him for it. But just as often-and with more sincerity she reassured him. She allowed him to make all the decisions and complained so haplessly her complaints amounted to very little. But this was insignificant to what bound them, for though in conversation he exaggerated his strength and she her weakness, he knew—and the knowledge gnawed at his confidence—how he leaned on her. So many times in those past days he had tried to reveal his fear to her! Emma, gentle, knew at what moment his pride would allow him to be reassured by hen But they had said nothing and now it was too late. She had seen what he loathed and dreaded, she had named his fear, and in that naming, locating the woman at the window, she had dismissed all her strength. Her picture of the fear was his, she had described his mind. Munday was stripped of his defenses; he was alone; there was no one to turn to.

Without knowing it she had defeated him by confirming his fear, and for the first time she was relying on the strength of his doubt, on his assurance that they were quite safe. Munday had repeated what she asked him to, but he had no answer to console her. He had no answer to console himself. He was staggered by the weight of his own and his wife’s fears. He worried about himself; poor health was his egotism: he saw himself collapsing, falling forward dead in the darkest room of the black house. That star of pain which had twinkled on and off now burned ceaselessly like a hot knuckle of decay in the pulp of his heart. His sleep was a kind of stumbling at night, going down in a restless doze and then scrambling to consciousness. Usually he lay awake, rigid in his bed, listening to the slow clock and the ping of the electric fire, his eyes wide open, wanting to wake his wife and talk to her. He envied her slumbering there, her body purring with snores, but he could not divulge his worry and he knew that to tell her his fears would be to have her awake beside him, fretting through the night.

One night, early in December, he slid out of bed to go downstairs for some aspirin. He made no sound. At the bedroom door he heard:

“Where are you going?” Her voice was sharp; its alert panic implored him. It was not the monotone of a person just awakened—it had the resigned clarity of his own when he said he’d be right back. He said nothing more; he imagined that their exchange had been overheard, and when he returned to the bed and Emma embraced him, pulling her nightgown to her waist and fingering his inner thigh, he drew away, whispered “No,” and immediately looked around half-expecting to see a witness, staring in a blue and gray dress.

In the daytime he was tense with fatigue, and though he did not sleep much in his bed he dozed in his chair, nodded over his food, and sometimes out walking he felt he could not go one step further: he wanted to drop to his knees and fall down in the sunlight on a grassy knoll and sleep and sleep. His mind spun, stampeding his thoughts, and his arms and eyes were heavy and wouldn’t work. So the preparation of his lecture took as long as if he was doing a paper for a learned society. He hated every moment of it, making notes, putting his colored slides and tapes in order and labeling the tools and weapons he planned to pass around to the audience.

After lunch, on the day he was due to give his lecture at the church hall, Emma said, “Let’s get some fresh air.”

It was cold and windy and very bright, typical of the weather in its new phase. There were slivers of ice in the stone birdbath that lay in the shadow of the house. They climbed the bank in the back garden and stood in the humming gorse and broom at the edge of the high meadow. Beneath them was the vast green Vale of Marshwood, sunlit and so deep they could take in most of it at a glance, the several village clusters—each marked by smoking chimneys and a square church steeple topped by a glinting gold weathercock—the dark measured hedgerows, the nibbling sheep like rugs of spring snow on the hillsides, the scattered herds of cows, and here and there small wooded areas, islands anchored in the rolling seas of the meadows. Wide gloomy patches of cloud shadow, the shape and speed of devil-fish, glided across the floor of the valley, rippling over trees, swept up the slope, and passed over the Mundays, blocking the sun and putting a chill on them. They continued to look, not humbled by the size, but triumphant; at their vantage point on its very edge, where it began to roll down, they had an easy mastery of it, like people before a contour map on a table. Each house and bam and church was toy-sized and the whole was marred only by the file of tall gray pylons and their spans of underslung wires across the southern end of the valley. At the sea was a ridge of hills, gold and green downs which opened where the low late-autumn sun dazzled on the water. That was as far as they could see. Closer, just under them, blue smoke swirled over a terrace of thatched cottages; a dog barked, three yaps, and there was a tractor whine, a laborious noise drifting up from where the vehicle was turning, at the border of a brown oval of earth in a large field. Miles away there was a short flash, the sun catching a shiny object; they saw the flash but not the man who held it. Around them were their trees, beech and oak, the ones that moaned at night and sang in the day; their limbs were bare, the leaves that had not been knocked off by the rain had been tom off by the gusts of wind. There was no mistaking them for African trees, which were only bare in swampland; these were stripped, and as tall and dark as a row of black-armed gallows.

This landscape had been subdued by the season and by men; it was settled and ordered, there were signs of farming to the horizon, and even those far islands of trees with the graceful shapes seemed deliberately planned. But it was frozen, the hedgerows broke the fields, and the green looked infertile, threatening to die and discolor for the winter. The mystery of the landscape was this apparent order, for which Munday, who saw signs of habitation but no people apart from the tractor driver—and he was tiny—could not discern a purpose. This emptiness seemed unlikely, and it was unexpected; not an England he had ever known, so green and new to his eye, it was a rural scene he had always suspected was spoken about because it did not exist, a willfully inaccurate nostalgia duplicating the Bwamba’s inability to describe their own swampy homeland because they did not see it. He wanted to deny it. But there it was before him, like an illustration in a child’s book of ambiguously menacing rhymes. Emma said, “I told you. It’s lovely. I knew it would be like this—you see?” The colors were right, the air pure, and the enclosing valley so shaped at their feet it invited them to wander down to explore it.

They descended the slope to a hedge fence of brambles and immediately lost the view. The high hedge hid coils of rusting barbed wire in long thorny whips of untrimmed raspberry bushes with some withered berries still blackening on them. They had a new view, the rise of Lewesdon Hill, a thickly wooded portion with its spine sliced by a field, and beyond it the green fortress of Pilsdon Pen. Munday helped Emma over a gate that was held fast with hoops of knotted wire, and they made their way down the uneven field of tough grass clumps and dried crinkled cow turds to a muddy section by a stone watering trough in the corner. The bark had been chewed from some saplings there. In the mud were large hoof-prints of cows and small precise ones of heifers, like two parallel texts of a translated poem. The cows were grazing in the next field; they raised their heads and, champing slowly, observed the man and wife.

“God, how healthy they look—what fat beasts! Do you remember—?”

Emma was reminding him of the skinny humped African cattle, switching their crooked tails at the flies on their sores and nosing at the dusty grass. But Munday had looked back at the brow of the hill they had just descended and seen the upper part of the house, and understood the name, the Black House. Stuck in that greenery, surrounded by bare trees and one high holly bush and a dense yew, it seemed a place blighted by age, stained dark like the nightmare house with no windows or doors he had seen in his dream at this exact angle—his dream spectacle of conventional grief had been the creepiest of foreshadowings, and he was glad the house was not his: he could discard it and leave, simply go away. He turned from it, glad to be free of all those rooms, which were colder than the thicket at the edge of the field they were now passing through. The walking tired him, and when he replied to Emma about the cows his throat was dry, his voice strained. He gasped, his breathlessness causing in him a confusing annoyance. He saw thorns and dead berries and \vhat had seemed so green was soiled tussocky grass in a pasture diordered by muddy tracks. He smashed at the hedge with his walking stick.

They were in a field, entirely boxed in by deep, closely woven hedges, with no gate except the one they had entered by. They had to walk back, retracing their steps through the mud, past the cows gaping in the upper pasture, untill they came to tire tracks which led through another gate to a narrow lane. Munday stamped the mud from his boots. Emma said, “Look.”

Two boys were coming towards them in the road, laboring up the hill from the direction of the valley. They were in a bend in the road the sun never reached: banks topped with grassy cliffs and scored with rain gullies rose up on either side, and pools of tracked-over mud had collected where the gullies met the road. In that damp shadow the boys were two forlorn figures, stooping with their loads and scuffing the mud as they went along. Their hair was mussed, and tufts of it stuck up like owls’ horns; they had a dirty rumpled look, as if they had been sleeping outdoors in a nest of leaves. The taller one, who was not more than eleven or twelve, had large unlaced shoes on his sockless feet and wore a man’s pinstriped suit jacket which flopped open to his torn shirt; the younger one, who was half his size, wore a checked woolen jacket that was much too small for him, and red mud-smeared boots. They both wore shrunken shorts and now Munday saw they were carrying empty beer bottles in their arms.

“Hello there,” said Munday.

The taller one giggled and dropped his eyes, the other put his head down shyly and both walked a bit faster. It was their color that appalled Munday; their pinched faces were that pale luminous white that is almost blue, and their knees, so absurdly larger than their skinny legs, were also bluish. They had the round shoulders and the gait of very old men, and shining mustaches of snot, and their bottles clinked as they splashed past, seeming to hurry.

“Terrible,” whispered Emma. “The poor things. Did you see their teeth?”

Munday had not realized how cold it was until he had seen those ragged boys in shorts. Now he noticed it was near freezing. He said, “They should be in school.”

“Where do you suppose they’re going?”

“Obviously to The Yew Tree, to return those bottles. Get a few pence.”

“They must live down there in those cottages,” said Emma, starting down the hill.

They walked around the bend in the road, squelching through the mud, to the row of cottages. What had looked so charming from behind their house, the sweep of the valley coming up to meet the thatched cottages with the smoking chimneys, the quilt of fields, the browsing sheep, now lost all its simplicity. The thatch was torn and partially mended, bristling brooms of new straw stuck out from the eaves, sheets of chicken wire held it together on the roof peak. The wall of the end cottage bulged, seams of cement had burst, and the foundation at one comer had cracked and come loose. The. fields were sodden and crisscrossed by deep ruts, the sheep was spattered with mud, and their yellow wool, the texture of elderly hair, was painted with crude red symbols. A dog bounded past the sheep, scattering them, and then ran to the Mundays and barked fiercely, holding itself low on the ground, crouching and inching closer as he snarled.

“There, there.” Emma spoke softly to the dog and reached over to stroke its head. It lifted its jaws and snapped at her hand and continued to bark. Emma stepped away, but still murmured her gentle disappointment, hoping to calm the dog.

“No friendlier than anyone else around here,” said Munday. He held his walking stick tightly and he noted a spot at the back of the dog’s head where he would land the blow.

“Aw, he won’t hurt you.”

The voice, Hosmer’s—they looked up and saw him in the yard, peering at them from under his hat brim—was flat, without encouragement or welcome. He was just above them, leaning on a shovel, in a green jacket with the pockets tom and flapping, wearing high gumboots.

“Likes to play, he does,” said Hosmer.

The dog had mounted Emma’s leg and left streaked paw prints on the light mac she had bought especially for these walks. She took the dog by its forelegs and pushed at its slavering mouth. She said, “Naughty— stop it!”

“Off ’er!” said Hosmer sharply to the dog. It pulled out of Emma’s grasp and bounded a few feet away and yelped and shook itself, turning in circles.

“So this is where you live,” said Munday, starting up the bank towards Hosmer. It was the bluff, genial tone he used with Africans in their bush compounds. “Very nice indeed. Your garden?”

“Yes, sir,” said Hosmer, straightening on his shovel and speaking with a guarded respect Munday felt might be impossible to penetrate with any friendliness.

“It’s a perfect site,” said Emma. She brushed at the paw prints with the heel of her hand.

“Mr. Awdry’s,” said Hosmer. “He owns the lot. We rent her, this end of the cottage. One of Duddle’s tenants has the other half.”

“But you get the sun,” said Emma.

“When she’s out,” said Hosmer.

“It’s a beautiful view.”

“That’s Shave’s Cross,” said Hosmer, choosing to indicate a smudge of squares on the landscape, a small cluster of distant gray cottages in the miles and miles of green farmland and trees. It occurred to Munday that a Bwamba might have done the same. Hosmer said, “Over there’s Lyme Regis.” It was a purpling hill, a promonotory at the horizon.

Munday was looking at the cottages. “I see,” he said. “Each of these three buildings is divided in half. That would make five more families living here. Almost a hamlet.”

“Four others,” said Hosmer. “Last one’s standing empty.”

“You’re a lucky man,” said Munday. “There are people in London who’d give anything to have a place like this.”

“Would they?” said Hosmer gruffly. “Well, they can stop where they are.”

“They’re not so bad,” Munday joked. “Once you get used to them.”

“I don’t get used to them,” said Hosmer. “Twenty guineas a week they pay—for a cottage! All that whisky, and the things they do. They want us in the council houses. Bloody nuisance, I say. They can bloody stop where they are.”

“They put the prices up, that it?” said Munday. He smiled; it was an African remark, made of foreign visitors.

Hosmer said, “And my back.”

“Is this all your garden?” asked Emma.

“Yes, ma’m.”

“May we look around?”

“Mind the mud,” said Hosmer. “Been raining. The cows come through here and chums it up.”

“You still have sprouts!” Emma showed Munday the tall plants with the pale green bulbs on their stalks.

“No bloody good to me,” said Hosmer. “Growing into flowers and rotting.” He turned on his shovel and watched the Mundays stroll to the bottom of the garden, Emma looking at the view, Munday lifting a tangle of vines with his walking stick for a better look at the marrows.

“It’s magnificent,” said Emma. She faced the sea where the low sun, wreathed in a gray shallow cloud, still shimmered on the water.

Munday headed for the back of the cottages. He heard Hosmer say, “Sorry I can’t offer you anything,” and Emma reply, “Oh, we were just out for a walk—” In the straw-clumps behind the cottages Munday saw rusting tools, an unused generator black with oil, a gutted motor, and tractor parts, a crankshaft, bolts and wheel-rims and a pile of lumber. He poked at them with his stick. A line of washing, faded overalls, yellow underwear, and blue shirts 'whitened with bleach stains blew noisily, the arms and legs filling with wind, and the line itself lifted. Munday crossed the humpy ground to the fence at the edge of Hosmer’s property to get a better look at the valley, and he was standing trying to memorize the rhythm of the hills, the play of light and shadow, when his thoughts were interrupted by a ribbon of decay leaking past his nose. He sniffed and lost it and then smelled it powerfully, the ribbon growing to a whole rag of stink.

A few feet away, just by a wire fence, was a little platform covered by an old brown piece of canvas. He saw that Hosmer and Emma were out of sight; he stepped over to it and lifted one comer with his stick. He saw white flesh, narrow sinews and the tight bundles of muscle. His first thought was that it was a human corpse, and that fear of discovering a dead man lessened the shock of seeing the hairy rug, the paws, and—lifting the stiff canvas higher—the two dead dogs, lying side by side on the wooden platform. They had been killed, and Munday thought flayed (the word came to him before he actually saw the slashes), and they lay there on the shelf, speckled by decay, beside their own folded pelts.

Munday dropped the canvas and hurried to the side of the cottage, where Hosmer and Emma were still standing and talking.

“I was just telling your missus,” said Hosmer, squinting. “That end cottage—she’s rented.”

Walking home Emma said, “Those were his boys. I asked him. I wish there were something we could do.”

“Bring them to the attention of Oxfam,” he said. “Alfred.”

“There’s nothing,” he said. “He doesn’t even want us around.”

“They look so beaten.”

“Not beaten,” he said. “Detribalized.”

“It’s so ironic,” Emma said, “living in such squalor with that magnificent view.”

Munday said, “Let’s keep to the road this time, shall we?”

And he knew as they talked about the early twilight, the dusk falling on the hills around them, that he would say nothing about the dead dogs. That baffling scene he understood only as an enactment of violence, but something no usual motive could properly explain or make less beastly was another secret he would have to keep from her and beat alone. It was like a hidden infidelity, a habit of faithlessness he was starting to learn, suppressing what frightened him so that Emma would not be alarmed.

They expected an unheated church hall, so Munday wore a zippered cardigan under his thick tweed suit, and Emma her wool dress and jacket; she carried her mac carefully folded on the arm because of the paw prints. But it was very warm in the hall, Munday felt the heat as soon as he stepped inside, and he commented on it to the vicar.

“They like it this way,” said Crawshaw. He smiled at the seated people as he spoke, and led Munday to the stage. “Pensioners, you see—they really feel the cold. It’s why we have these monthly talks. The central heating in here is so expensive. We put some of the proceeds toward the fuel bill. It’s oil-fired. One day we’ll have a new hall.”

Munday said, “If anyone asks me whether it’s hot in Africa I’ll say, ‘No hotter than this room!’ ” There was also a dusty sweetness in the air, like flower scent but cloying, the odor of talcum, cologne, and bay rum, perfumes Of the aged that rubbed against Munday’s eyes.

Every seat was taken. Some people turned and stared as Munday and the vicar walked up the center aisle, but he saw most of them from the back, the suspended lamps lighting their white hair and giving it the thin wispiness of little nest-:like caps of illuminated cobwebs. The bald spots shone. It might have been a gathering for a church service they were so still, almost prayerful; and that look of piety was somehow intensified by the size of their heads, which were very small and set on disproportionately large shoulders.

When Munday reached the front of the hall and mounted the stage he saw the reason for this—they were all dressed for outdoors, each person wore a heavy winter coat. From the front, bundled up in this way, they looked defiant to Munday, annoyed in their cumbersome winter clothes. But there was a general unbuttoning and opening of the coats when they saw Munday and the vicar.

A man on stage was fumbling with a screen, trying to set it up. Crawshaw introduced him to Munday as Chester Lennit.

“Sorry I don’t have a free hand,” said Lennit, flashing Munday a faintly sheepish smile. “Be through in a minute, though,” he said, but as he spoke the tripod collapsed, and the telescoping upright shot down with a great clatter. Heads bobbed in the audience. Lennit pulled it again into position and said, “Bally thing won’t hold.”

The people in the audience watched with bright eyes.

“Mr. Lennit is in charge of our visual aids,” said Crawshaw.

“Not trained for it, or anything like that,” said Lennit. “I used to be with British Rail, on the accounts side, in London. For years.”

“Perhaps I can give you a hand,” said Munday.

“No, I’ve done this lots of times before,” said Lennit. He wouldn’t let himself be helped. He said, “Very fiddly, these things. You just have to know the right combination.” He looped the screen once again onto the upright and nudged the tripod into place with his foot. It crashed again. “Oh, God,” he muttered, and his grip on the apparatus became strangulatory.

Crawshaw turned to the audience: “While Mr. Lennit’s putting the screen into shape, I’d like to make a few announcements. First, Mrs. Crawshaw asked me to thank all of you who kindly brought fresh flowers for the memorial service last Sunday. Those of you who spent Saturday afternoon polishing the brasses deserve a special vote of thanks. The Christmas supper is scheduled for the twenty-second, and may I just say a word about our charity drive for the less fortunate in Four Ashes? It’s not too early to start thinking about setting tins and warm clothes aside—”

Emma, in the front row, was listening to the vicar. Munday tried to catch her eye—he wanted her to wink at him; she turned and smiled slightly and went back to the vicar. She looked calm, but after the walk that evening she had stopped in the courtyard of the house and said, “I don’t want to go in.” Munday had entered first. He called to her; there was nothing. Behind her now, making her seem almost girlish in her Indian silk scarf, the rows of elderly listeners hunched in their dark coats received the vicar’s news without reacting. Then Munday realized that they were not looking at the vicar, but rather at Mr. Lennit who at the back of the stage was stretching the screen into position for the fourth time.

Munday, scowling in the heat, was struck by their certain age, which he took to be around seventy, and by the uniformity of their appearance. They looked so similar, they shared so many features: their faces were small, bony, skull-like, some of the women’s faces looked dusted with flour, and yet none gave the impression of being sickly. Their postures were the same; they sat on the folding chairs, their hands clutched in their laps, bent slightly forward, as if straining to hear, or perhaps to get a better view of Mr. Lennit. Many of the men wore lapel pins, some two or three, and the women small corsages, sprigs of winter flowers on their coats. It was a vision for Munday of old age crowded in a hall, like a council convened by the geriatrics in a village convinced of their own doom. There were such villages on remote African hillsides, from which all the young people had fled in a time of famine or drought, leaving the aged ones to resist, huddled in broken huts. Munday had seen them crouched in shadows, facing fields parching in a killing sun.

“—I think,” said the vicar, glancing behind him, “that Mr. Lennit has succeeded in putting up his awfully complicated cinema screen. Before we begin I must ask you to avoid stepping on the cord to the slide projector. We don’t want a repetition of the Hardy talk!”

A mirthful hum vibrated in the audience, and chairs clanked as people shifted in their seats.

The vicar said to Munday, “Someone plunged us into darkness that night. Gave some of the good ladies here quite a shock.”

Munday nodded and said, “Rather.”

“This evening,” said the vicar, raising his voice, “we are privileged to have with us a man who has spent a good part of his life in some very sticky places. Africa has always had a strange fascination for the English. We explored its jungles, we fought there— many Englishmen still lie buried there—we cplonized and brought light to that dark continent. A few of you here tonight have yourselves been to Africa and can claim some credit for these accomplishments. Today, Her Majesty no longer rules over Africa, and the territories that flew the Union Jack now have their own flags of various colors. From what we read in the papers they seem terribly confusing—”

The introduction went on for several more minutes and continued to embarrass Munday, and when the vicar said, “I give you—Doctor Munday,” he stepped forward to the dry clapping and realized how inappropriate the opening remarks he had prepared were, how scholarly and ill-suited to the mood of this provincial place. So he began by saying, “The vicar called it sticky. It’s only that in the literal sense, never very dangerous. In fact I should say it’s a good deal safer than London!”

They laughed at this, and he went on, encouraged by their amusement, trying to find a way into the talk he had prepared. “They say Africa gets into one’s blood. It’s probably truer to say it gets under one’s skin!” This time he paused for the laughter, but it was slighter than before, and scattered, and he quickly resumed, “Unless you’re a chap like me who rather enjoys poking his nose in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. It’s a queer kind of community, an African village, but in many ways no different from your own village. The social organization is quite similar, there are meeting places like this church hall, and shops, and village elders to whom, like the vicar here, people look for counsel. So when you think of an African village, don’t think of a great mass of gibbering black people with bones in their noses, shaking spears and beating on tom-toms”—here there was some laughter, but Munday pressed on without acknowledging it— “think of yourselves.”

And then he said, “You understand in Four Ashes what it’s like to be a bit off the map, and tonight I’m going to talk to you about another remote people—” He sensed a slackening in the audience’s attention right away, an adjustment to heaviness in them he tried to shift with his voice; fighting for their .eyes made his tone preachy and somewhat strident. Emma had advised him to pick one person and speak to him. He did this: the man was in the third row, and was distinguished by a fine tweed coat, lighter than all the others. Munday continued speaking; the man put his chin in his hand reflectively; his head tilted to the side and the hand seemed to tip the head onto his shoulder. Asleep, he seemed especially aged. Munday searched the hall for another face.

“It’s a law of nature,” he was saying, “that once a group of people has been cut off from the world they begin to change. Their direction alters—though they have no sense of having turned. They have nothing, no one, to measure themselves by, except a distant feeble memory of the way things were once done. You must bear in mind that certain activities put us in touch with other people—trade, selling our skills and goods, travel, reading, even warfare helps us to come to an understanding of the world outside the village. But where there is little saleable skill, a subsistence economy, a reluctance to travel, and where people are entirely self-sufficient, they withdraw to a shadowy interior world. This inspires certain fears —irrational fear, you might say, is a penalty of that isolation. Who can verify it or tell you it doesn’t matter? Who can witness this decline? The remote people begin to act in a manner that looks very strange indeed to an outsider. Their sense of time, for example, is slowed down. The sameness of the days makes them easy to forget and so history goes unwitnessed. It’s a kind of sleep. There is ‘little innovation because really there is no need for it. What is not understood—and this can be as simple and casual as a tree falling across the road in a storm—is called magic. And this happens in more places than the witch-ridden society of semi-pygmies at the latter end of the world.

“But the most remarkable thing is that a village isolated in this way becomes wholly unaware of its isolation. The village is the world, the people are real, and everything else is mysteriously threatening. So the stranger comes, as I did ten years ago to that remote village, and he is viewed from an alarming perspective. He might be seen as dangerous, or else —it happens—as a kind of savior. He is not a man like them. The Bwamba, who had never seen a white woman before, thought my wife was a man. Ten years ago the Bwamba believed white men were cannibals, who fed on Africans. It’s odd: the only mystery for the stranger is that little clearing in the jungle, which thinks of itself as the only real thing.”

He thought the paradox might drag them into motion, but they were unresponsive, sitting at doubtful attention, some in the sleeping postures of broken statuary. Many were still awake—he knew that from their coughing.

“What if it happened,” he went on, “that the stranger was himself from a remote village? Suppose the English villager meets the African villager— the isolation they have in common is the very thing that isolates them from each other. There is not a syllable of speech they can share. Common humanity, you might reply; of course, yes, but if each has been marked by his solitude, aren’t we then dealing with two separate consciousnesses which have evolved in circumstances so different that nothing at all can be spoken and no judgment can be possible? The English villager might report that what he has seen is strange. What will the African report? The same, of course. Mr. Kurtz said his Africans were brutes; what did those Africans make of Kurtz? What did Schweitzer’s patients make of that shambling old man playing his pipe-organ in the jungles of Gabon? Imagine, if you can, the opinions of Livingstone’s porters, Burton’s guides, Mungo Park’s paddlers! Anthropology is man speculating on man, but when the man who is the subject turns around and becomes the speculator, you see how relative the terms ‘barbaric’ and ‘simple’ and ‘primitive' are.

“And reality, what is reality?” he asked of the dozing people in the hall. “It is a guess, a wish, a clutch of fears, an opinion offered without any hope of proof. One might say that only pain can possibly substantiate it You see the oddest things, you know, dead things or specters, that can cause you such panic that to dismiss them makes any argument for reality a series of arrogant notions inspired by the sharpest fear.”

Emma’s eyes were fixed on him. He spoke to her: “We accept what reality is bearable and try to ignore the rest, because we know it would kill us to see it all. I see Fve wandered a little from my subject,” he said. And he had; the impassive, unresponding audience had caused it. He was talking to himself and to Emma. He said, “In closing, let me say that for a long time I’ve thought of doing a rather unfashionable book, in which we see anthropologists through the eyes of their subjects. Think about it for a moment. Malinowski as described by the Trobriand islanders, Levi-Strauss’s fastidious Frenchness noted by the Nambikwara Indians in the Mato-Grosso. The headhunter’s view of the anthropologist, you might say. It would be interesting to see how we invent one another.”

He expected a reaction but got none. There was not a murmur of recognition from the audience. Munday had been talking forcefully in a high-pitched voice, that preaching tone, to stir them. They had not moved. Now he could see that several more had fallen asleep and the rest had a look of nervous fatigue, as if in speaking so loud (he imagined that, being old, many of them were hard of hearing) he had intimidated those he had not put to sleep. He wanted to fly up to the ceiling and look down at those shining bald spots, that white hair, all those small heads.

He described Bwamba music and played his tape, an old Bwamba woman’s lament for a husband who died young. He translated the song, which was a description of the man, praising him, likening him to a powerful crested crane. The song was a harsh series of caws, with a sad muttered refrain; it was accompanied by a plunking finger-harp and several gourd horns. Afterwards there was some whispering in the hall.

Munday said, “Now let’s look at the people themselves. Mr. Lennit?”

Lennit inserted a box of slides into the projector. He said, “Lights, please,” and the hall, in total darkness, began to purr with the murmuring voices of the old people.

Huge trembling fingers appeared on the screen, fretting like swollen spider’s legs. There was some laughter. Lennit said, “She’s jammed, I think,” and the fingers clutched in the empty square of light.

With a resounding clang, a slide of the eastern slopes of the Ruwenzori Mountains appeared on the screen. It had been taken on a clear day, the mountains were emerald, the cloudless sky a bright blue, and in the foreground was a thick grove of banana trees. There were lingering exclamations in the audience, “Oh!” and “Lovely.”

“Mountains of the Moon,” said Munday. He stood next to the screen, tapping it with a slender stick. “Next slide.”

This was of a back road, russet-colored mud cratered with wide pot-holes. “That,” said Munday, “is the main road into the mountains.” He mused, “I broke any number of springs on that particular stretch.”