The Red Door (25 page)

When they were finished eating, he said, ‘I will leave you for a few moments.’

He went into an adjoining room and changed quickly. When he came back he was wearing a shepherd’s cloak and carrying a stick.

‘Do you not know me?’ he asked.

Something about the cloak and the stick and the way in which he spoke in their own language recalled him to Simeon, who was the first to speak.

‘You are Joseph,’ he said in astonishment, his face whitening.

‘And you are next to the Pharaoh,’ said Reuben, in equal astonishment.

‘Our brother has made good,’ said Judah mockingly.

Joseph looked at Benjamin but Benjamin could not remember him very well.

This made him extremely sad, sadder than he had been for a long time.

‘We were envious of you in those days,’ said Simeon quickly. ‘It was because your father had chosen you as the heir and you were only the second youngest; and, after all, it
was we who looked after the sheep. Isn’t that right, Judah?’

‘I hated him,’ said Judah. ‘He was a horrible little bastard.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Reuben. ‘He might have acted a bit arrogant now and again but we must always make allowances for the young.’

‘In any case,’ said Simeon, his eyes darting hither and thither, ‘you’ve got a high position now and you’ve got to admit that if it hadn’t been for us you
wouldn’t have got it.’

Joseph gritted his teeth but said nothing. They hadn’t changed. But they were still his own people. He thought: Local Boy makes good. From Poet to Administrator.

He thought of the day not so long before when the foreman had come to him looking half starved. He had brought him a small replica of Joseph which he had designed.

‘I have spent a year on this,’ he said to Joseph. ‘It’s very valuable. I will give it to you for six bags of corn.’

‘Six bags of corn?’ said Joseph. He looked at the replica which was green in colour and beautifully made.

‘You haven’t flattered me,’ he said.

‘No, that is not my job,’ said the foreman. ‘Do you want it? It is a portrait of my opposite, the administrator of genius whom I hate. I am an artist of genius.’

‘You should have built the barns,’ said Joseph. ‘Now you wouldn’t be starving.’

‘I don’t regret anything,’ said the foreman, looking round the barns. ‘I did what I had to do. Do you want the replica?’

‘Three bags,’ said Joseph, looking at him keenly.

‘No.’

‘Seven then.’

‘No, I want six. It’s worth exactly six, neither more nor less.’

‘In that case I won’t take it,’ said Joseph firmly.

The foreman picked up the replica and turned away. ‘I don’t blame you. We think differently. However, I had thought you would have respect for number.’

‘All right,’ said Joseph. ‘I’ll take it though you haven’t flattered me.’

‘I would have asked more for it,’ said the foreman, ‘only my wife died when I was working on it, and I don’t need so much food now.’

‘I see,’ said Joseph. ‘Goodbye.’

The foreman turned away, his clothes loose on him but his eyes still twinkling.

Joseph seemed to wake up and said to his brothers:

‘You will have to stay here now and I will find jobs for all of you. You can all do something. Even Judah could wrestle for money.’

‘That’s very realistic of you,’ said Simeon, rubbing his hands.

‘It will be a good thing to be the brother of so important a man,’ said Benjamin.

Joseph left them whispering together and sought his wife whom he kissed fondly.

15

When his father came they talked together in the garden. His father was bearded and weaker than he had been. Joseph said to him:

‘I know now what my destiny has been. Everything led to you being here. I was destined to save my tribe. And the dream came true.’

His father nodded.

Joseph added:

‘I find it strange that I have saved you by becoming corrupt. I hate it and I don’t know whether I shall be able to bear it.’

‘We all become corrupt,’ said his father. ‘That is the penalty of living. I too am corrupt. Once I betrayed my brother. Later I had to bribe him with camels. He was stronger
than me physically but I was more astute than he was. Also in order to gain my wife, whom I truly loved, I was betrayed and then I betrayed my father-in-law in turn. That is the way the world is.
Even God accepts that or we wouldn’t have been so successful.’

‘What I miss most are my dreams,’ said Joseph. ‘The famine will soon be over and my work done.’

He banged his hand on a stone.

‘But what I miss most are my dreams. When I was innocent they served me nothing. Then I sold them and here I am surrounded by furniture, riches and food.’

‘That is so,’ said his father nodding. ‘I don’t understand it either but that is the way it is.’

‘I loved my dreams,’ said Joseph, ‘and now I love number. Soon perhaps I won’t love even that. Perhaps I will be like Judah, bored to death watching the sheep. And all I
shall have left will be my furniture. Sometimes I feel it is eating me up.’

‘Furniture will not kill you,’ said his father, ‘though the wild beasts will. You have more than survived.’

A bird flew out of the garden carrying a worm in its beak like a dangling necklace. The beak was black and the worm red.

‘I am here,’ said Joseph slowly, ‘and what we call destiny has put me here. That is what we say.’

‘That is right,’ said his father, thinking of Rachel standing by the well years ago, the camels’ shadows slanting along the ground and his father-in-law coming out to meet him,
rubbing his hands briskly and smiling above his beard.

Life is good, he thought, but this is a strange land. We desert folk miss the desert, its purity and its treachery.

Nevertheless, with the greed of an old man he thought: I shall have plenty to eat now.

The idiot stood on the pavement. In his right hand he had a tube which looked like a recorder. Absently he scratched the left ear of his crew-cut head. He turned his head to
the right, jutting his lips out. Then he turned his head to the left. He sighted along the recorder as if it were a gun. He put it down by his side and ran it along his thigh. Then he absently
scratched his crotch, looking up into the sky. His face was young and brick-red in colour, like that of a Nazi who had drunk too much. He was fifty years old and boyish. He knelt down and tapped
the recorder against his shoe. He tried to drill his shoe with the recorder. He stood up and looked about him. He scratched his left ear again.

The professor walked up the road, one hand swinging free. He stopped beside the idiot. The idiot looked up at the professor, stroking the recorder. The professor spoke to the
idiot, putting his hand on the idiot’s shoulder. The idiot looked at him unblinkingly. The professor tried to take the recorder from the idiot, but the idiot at first wouldn’t give it
to him. Finally he gave it to him. The professor put the recorder to his lips. He played the recorder standing on one leg. He made some music with it. The idiot looked at him in amazement. Then he
scratched his crotch again.

Two girls passed, arm in arm, giggling. The idiot looked away from the professor, after the two girls. They waved to him and he nodded his head vigorously. The professor turned the recorder up
towards the sky as if he were examining it for stars. The idiot watched him carefully. The books the professor was carrying fell to the ground. A boy and a girl who were passing bent down and
picked them up. The idiot bent down also. The girl was wearing a yellow miniskirt like a flower. The idiot could see the backs of her thighs. The professor took the books and picked up his hat
which had fallen down. He crammed the latter on his head. He looked vaguely at the nearby church and crooned to himself. He wasn’t a tall man, perhaps five foot four, and he had a small white
beard. The idiot took the recorder and marched up and down like a sergeant major on parade, swinging his left arm. The professor took the recorder from him and marched up and down, twirling it like
a drum majorette. They laughed together.

The tanned visitors came home from the sea and the glens. They stood and watched the idiot and the professor. Some were in sandals, others were naked above the waist. They
looked happy and tired, having built sandcastles all day. There were countless numbers of them, and they all stopped to look at the idiot. The idiot snatched the recorder from the professor and the
professor made a face and stalked off.

A drunk came weaving up the road, dodging the cars which were honking furiously at him. He put his arm round the idiot’s shoulders and began to speak to him. The idiot listened, gazing
impassively ahead of him. Suddenly he brought the recorder down on the drunk’s head. The drunk nodded his head like a boxer after a heavy punch and moved on, swaying from side to side. The
idiot jutted his lips.

The people looked at him, not knowing what to say to him. He looked back at them. The sun briefly dazzled along his recorder. He pointed it at them as if he were going to shoot them. They
giggled among each other and pointed at him.

A policeman came and began to move them along. The idiot stood stout and firm, facing the traffic with the recorder in his mouth, his face expressionless. He looked like an American.

The professor had gone home. He took from his bookcase a monograph he had written about Descartes many years before. He read it every night. This was only another night he was reading it.

Many people wrote postcards by the light of the summer sun, telling how they had seen an idiot and how queer he was.

The sea bounded against the rocks.

A boy and a girl stood against a tree whose green leaves made their faces green. The boy put his hand around the girl and caressed her buttocks. She caressed the back of his neck. Her eyes
closed. A sheep stared at them. In the distance a motor cycle accelerated. High above the brae there was a rubbish dump full of rats and discarded canisters and the dead body of a ewe.

His father took the recorder from the idiot and put it away in a drawer. The idiot made a sound deep in his throat and scratched his crotch.

‘If only there was some expression on your face,’ said the father. ‘Even one bit of damned expression. Just one iota.’

from

THE BLACK AND THE RED

and other stories

PART I

When the breathing got worse he went into the adjacent room and got the copy of Dante. All that night and the night before he had been watching the dying though he didn’t
know it was a dying. The grey hairs around the head seemed to panic like the needle of a compass and the eyes, sometimes open, sometimes shut, seemed to be looking at him all the time. He had never
seen a dying before. The breathlessness seemed a bit like asthma or bad bronchitis, ascending sometimes into a kind of whistling like a train leaving a station. The voice when it spoke was
irritable and petulant. It wanted water, lots of water, milk, lots of milk, anything to quench the thirst and even then he didn’t know it was a dying. The tongue seemed very cold as he fed it
milk. It was cold and almost stiff. Once near midnight he saw the cheeks flare up and become swollen so that the eyes could hardly look over them. When a mirror was required to be brought she
looked at it, moving her head restlessly this way and that. He knew that the swelling was a portent of some kind, a message from the outer darkness, an omen.

Outside, it was snowing steadily, the complex flakes weaving an unintelligible pattern. If he were to put the light out then that other light, as alien as that from a dead planet, the light of
the moon itself, would enter the room, a sick glare, an almost abstract light. It would light the pages of the Dante which he needed now more than ever, it would cast over the poetry its hollow
glare.

He opened the pages but they did not mean anything at all since all the time he was looking at the face. The dying person was slipping away from him. She was absorbed in her dying and he did not
understand what was happening. Dying was such an extraordinary thing, such a private thing. Sometimes he stretched out his hand and she clutched it, and he felt as if he were in a boat and she were
in the dark water around it. And all the time the breathing was faster and faster as if something wanted to be away. The brow was cold but the mouth still wanted water. The body was restlessly
turning, now on one side now on the other. It was steadily weakening. Something was at it and it was weakening.

In Thy Will is My Peace . . . The words from Dante swam into his mind. They seemed to swim out of the snow which was teeming beyond the window. He imagined the universe of Dante like a watch.
The clock said five in the morning. He felt cold and the light was beginning to azure the window. The street outside was empty of people and traffic. There was no one alive in the world but
himself. The lamps cast their glare over the street. They brooded over their own haloes all night.

When he looked again the whistling was changing to a rattling. He held one cold hand in his, locking it. The head fell back on the pillow, the mouth gaping wide like the mouth of a landed fish,
the eyes staring irretrievably beyond him. The one-barred electric fire hummed in a corner of the room, a deep and raw red wound. His copy of Dante fell from his hand and lay on top of the red
woollen rug at the side of the bed stained with milk and soup. He seemed to be on a space ship upside down and seeing coming towards him another space ship shaped like a black mediaeval helmet in
all that azure. On board the space ship there was at least one man encased in a black rubber suit but he could not see the face. The man was busy either with a rope which he would fling to him or
with a gun which he would fire at him. The figure seemed squat and alien like an Eskimo.

And all the while the window azured and the body was like a log, the mouth twisted where all the breath had left it. It lolled on one side of the pillow. Death was not dignified. A dead face
showed the pain of its dying, what it had struggled through to become a log. He thought, weeping, this is the irretrievable centre where there is no foliage and no metaphor. At this time poetry is
powerless. The body looked up at him blank as a stone with the twisted mouth. It belonged to no one that he had ever known.