Turning Back the Sun Page 18

  Rayner sat through the vacuum of the next hours half asleep and watching the plains ruffle into hills. The carriage air thickened with cigarette smoke and the reek of half-eaten mangoes and salami. He drew down the blinds against the sun. The conscript, who had not travelled before, was sick out of the window, and the desultory talk among the passengers faded out. By late afternoon they had entered the mountains, and the clank of the carriages over bridges and the blurred pulse of their wheels in the tunnels, kept everyone intermittently awake. In four hours they saw no life but wheeling kestrels and a village of native goatherds. It was a land of shale and treeless valleys. Huge boulders had snapped off the mountain tops and rolled down into the streams. Their scree scored the valleysides in unconcluded drifts, and looked still in motion. It was impossible to tell if they had fallen an epoch or a minute before.

  After dark Rayner climbed into a top bunk and lay close beneath the static fan-blades. They were black with dead mosquitoes. For the first time he felt the slight, listless fever which his patients had reported. He slid a hand between his shirt buttons and tracked the trickle of disruption over his ribs. But soon afterwards he must have fallen asleep, because an hour later he awoke in pitch dark to a strange stillness and silence. The train had stopped.

  He dropped softly to the floor and leaned out of the window. Opposite was a wall of mountain, overhung with stars. Hurricane lamps dithered up the track, and faint voices sounded where the engine threw two blobs of light into nothing, and three or four men were trying to pull something from under the cowcatcher.

  Rayner remembered that in twenty-four hours he must report for the military expedition. He enjoyed the thought of blamelessly missing it. He could not be court-martialled for a railway accident. Then he fell asleep again, and was woken in harsh daylight from a dream of Zoë by the shudder of the train stirring into life. They were already ten hours behind schedule, and for another five they gasped up the watershed of the massif. They saw no person, no building; only, here and there, the graves of convicts who had died constructing the railway thirty years before.

  Then suddenly they were descending, and everybody sensed a change. The air became closer, the sun fiercer. But the blinds flew up and the passengers kept peering out in anticipation until the mountains loosened and began to release them. Then, at last, they glimpsed below, and far beyond, the brilliant, sun-struck wilderness. It spread to a trembling skyline. And Rayner saw, with a surge of relief, that the whole sky above it, from horizon to horizon, was hung with a streaming concourse of clouds.

  By the time they had descended to the plain and crossed the empty cattlelands to the suburbs, it was evening. The light and heat had mellowed together. Outside the carriage window the bungalows went by in a mélange of corrugated iron and pink-tiled roofs, among scarlet bursts of flame trees. The train reached the station and the friendships of the journey ended. The financier was met by a business colleague, the conscript by an army sergeant, the schoolmistress by nobody.

  In the familiar streets the shopping crowds jostled with workers going home. Two of Rayner”s patients greeted him in passing, and wondered where he”d been. He asked news of the town, but nothing had changed, they said, except the sky. Yet the air was gentler, he felt, and an intangible burden seemed to be lifting. Perhaps the rains would even cleanse away the disease! He started to sing tunelessly to himself. In his absence the landmarks he passed had acquired a little strangeness: the Doric pilasters of the Municipality were sturdier, the mine”s flotation mills huger, even the St. Vincent de Paul charity shop appeared quainter. At the bottom of his street, the children”s roundabout looked more bright and minuscule than before, with its little painted cabins empty.

  His own house, when he entered it, might have been abandoned years before. Zoë”s rugs and hangings had gone, and the walls rose stark. He found himself staring at things in momentary bewilderment: at the charred circle in the annex rug, the empty cupboard where her costumes had hung, the stuffed armadillo in its alcove. Everything looked clean and incomplete. Yet only two weeks” mail was in the box, with a notice of confirmation that the army expedition would leave at dawn tomorrow.

  He walked back through the rooms, through his own self-inflicted desolation, and once or twice glanced at his face in the mirror as if it must have changed. In one corner of the kitchen he came upon a box which Zoë had packed with five mugs, and left behind. It was as if she had abandoned it there on purpose—like a last, tentative foothold in their union. Tomorrow, or soon after, she would arrive to retrieve it with some blithe allusion to her forgetfulness, and carry it away—if he allowed her—pretending that it had meant nothing.

  Then he was engulfed by a confused elation. One by one, he pulled the mugs from their wrappings and hung them back in their places on the dresser. He was glad that she could not see his trembling. Walking through the rooms again, he spread her hangings back on the walls in his imagination, and relaid her rugs over the floors. He pictured her presence there (the house had always been too big for him); he returned her to the sitting room among her plants, to her dance studio, to the bedroom. In the garden room he even imagined—as naturally as if they were waiting—successors to her lost child.

  By now it was dark outside. She must be at the club, he knew, but he gathered up the gifts which he had bought for her and went out into the streets. A light wind was driving new clouds over the stars. Already the pavements had emptied, and the noise of late cars was fading. The distinctive crunch and drag of his own footsteps was the loudest sound he heard. Once a pair of vigilantes crossed the road to stare at him, and a patrol car slowed uncertainly before moving away.

  The street where she lived was almost unlit. A single lamp stood like a lighthouse in a sea of dark. He padded across the intervening garden to rap on her flat door. He noticed his hand quivering. But nobody answered, and the windows were curtained. He put his gifts at the base of the doorstep, then did not know what to do. He wanted to wait for her here, to listen for the tap of her approaching feet, and call to her from the trees. But it was two hours before she would return. Her cat appeared in one window and stared at him.

  He ripped a piece of paper from his notebook, meaning to post it through her letter box, then realized he did not know how to write what he wanted to say. He sat down on her doorstep, while the wind sifted through the garden. Tentatively he began: “These gifts …” but stopped, and crumpled up the paper. The returning fever throbbed in his eyeballs. He tore another sheet from the notebook, and inscribed in a hard, clear hand, as if some valve of love in him had opened: I”ve come back. Forgive me.

  CHAPTER

  25

  The patrol crossed a treeless savannah where nothing moved. The grass whispered under the wheels, and the cracked earth carried them forward as if over a parquet floor. But they travelled blindly, by compass point, because no landmark—not the faintest ridge or knoll—broke the haze on the horizon.

  They had set off in four jeeps and a hush of secrecy before dawn, as if the natives might hear of their departure and somehow send news ahead. This feeling of being observed, which infected all the town, had spread even to the officers—Ivar and a surly lieutenant—who restrained the soldiers from singing or cheering as they left. Their objective, too, was secret.

  All morning they rustled across the plain over grasses which thrashed and whined against the truck sides. Then eucalyptus trees and acacia appeared, and airy shrubs which splattered the windscreens with pollen and burned-out seedpods. The ground turned noiseless under them. The jeeps spewed up a trail of red dust which penetrated even the men”s cartridge-magazines. A few bleached-looking birds twittered in the trees. Although they had long ago left behind any sign of habitation, they twice surprised cattle grazing in the underbush: black or brindled steers which lifted their heads in terror and blundered away through the scrub.

  Rayner travelled in the rear jeep, beside the driver. Six soldiers sat facing one another behind, their rifles unloaded between
their knees. They had started out exchanging boisterous jokes and lewd songs, but the heat and silence, the lonely immensity of wilderness and—now—their distance from home, had gradually turned them quiet. One by one they had peeled off their battle-dress shirts and sat sweating bare-chested, but the faces under their bush hats had gone uneasy. Rayner could feel the perspiration dropping down his ribs under his army shirt, but dared not take it off. He asked the driver, “Where d”you think we”re headed?”

  “Dunno, sir. Reckon it”s due south. But there”s nothing there.”

  Already Rayner was nervous of their objective. He guessed they were making for a place where the savages presented a solid target. It would be typical of Ivar to mete out punishment as if the natives were a coherent nation, and a few raiders in one part of the wilderness identical to an isolated clan in another. The last clash had occurred fourteen years ago, Rayner remembered, against a savage raiding party sixty strong. No white man had been killed because the natives had never reached spear-throwing distance. The soldiers had simply gunned them down at a range of 120 meters and left their corpses to the sun.

  He asked the driver, “Were you told to expect anything in particular?”

  “No.” The man was squinting into dust. “Just maybe a battle.”

  Now the forest had resolved into a harsh simplicity of red earth and white trees. It looked as if the rains of some earlier year had melted the ground into a rosy sea and smeared it over the jungle for hundreds of kilometers, until it had solidified again into this coral-colored pavement. The gum trees shone matt-white, like plaster of Paris, but often their bark had peeled back to reveal black, coagulated innards, as if the trees had burnt to death from inside.

  They stopped three times to eat or rest. The soldiers debouched from their jeeps and dispersed among the trees to smoke against orders, or defecate. They were a motley lot, Rayner thought, many of them young and jittery. With each stop they seemed to trust the forest less, until at evening they reclined with their backs to the trucks and their rifles at their sides.

  “You go into that fucking scrub,” said the platoon sergeant, “and in ten minutes you”ll be history. He”ll come and stick a spear in you and you won”t even see him.”

  Once the convoy slid to an unplanned halt. Rayner saw nothing at first but a screen of trees, then the soldiers clambered out. He found them in a wan semicircle, their rifles drooped. In front of them, sunk to its axles in the scarlet earth, was a burnt-out jeep. Grey termite hills rose round it like tombstones. It must have lain rotting here for fourteen years, ever since the last troubles. But nobody, not even the sergeant or the half-caste corporal, could recall the incident in which it had been lost. It simply rested there inexplicably, pillaged of any identification. For a moment they gazed at it in silence, while butterflies flickered through its empty windscreen. Then Ivar ordered them to move on.

  Rayner”s driver just murmured, “Christ!”

  For a long time now the convoy had travelled over an earth prickling with termite hills. There were millions of them. They covered the ground like a fakir”s bed, and seemed to go on forever. The lighter ones crumbled in powdery bursts against the jeeps” bumpers, but the drivers wove between the larger ones in a wearying eternity of curves. So dust thickened and stifled the sky worse than before. The whole earth, Rayner felt, must have been sifted through the intestines of these termites. It caked the men”s bodies like a darkening skin.

  Yet to Rayner, dreaming of Zoë, the forest had become attractive, and oddly restful. And its lifelessness, of course, was an illusion. The trees flashed with phosphorescent green and red parrots, and along the way a flock of blood-breasted cockatoos rose screaming from under their wheels. He even had the idea that he might find the old savage and his daughter wandering here, although he knew they could not have come so far and that they had taken another direction.

  Toward sunset the convoy crossed a region charred by bush fires. Eucalyptus trees still writhed from the ground, or had fallen all of a piece in white trunks whose pith had festered through them like rust breaking through paint.

  At dusk, beyond this double desolation, Ivar called a halt. There was no knoll or water hole to shelter by, not even a thicker growth of trees. They simply stopped. Some of the soldiers pegged out tents, but nobody used them. Instead they maneuvered the jeeps into a vestigial square, and rolled out their sleeping bags in the dust. When they unloaded their stores from the converted gun carriage limber, they found that the dust had penetrated even here, insinuating its grit into the bread and pressed beef, into everything except the water.

  The men sat in broken circles by their hurricane lamps. On all sides the shrill of the cicadas rose in a deafening curtain, drowning even the clink of the mess tins and the desultory conversation. The troopers smoked nervously in the gathering dark. They talked in mutters, as if the forest was listening, and those who had fallen asleep lay with their rifles at their sides.

  “How was the capital?”

  Rayner looked up to see Ivar, bare-chested. He held a lantern in one hand and a cartridge belt in the other. “Much the same.”

  He was surprised when Ivar sat beside him and stood his lantern between his feet. Perhaps Ivar had forgiven him, he thought, rather as he would pardon a wayward child, and Rayner even felt a foolish redemption. How typical of Ivar to elicit this pang of gratitude for his friendship! And after a while it seemed natural that they should be sitting here together—two old friends—rather than with Ivar”s grim lieutenant, and nothing seemed to have changed. With Ivar he had the illusion that nothing ever changed.

  “So you didn”t think of staying in the capital?”

  “No,” Rayner said warily. “I”ve got too used to the town.” In the lamplight Ivar”s expression remained obscure, but in case it flickered with “I told you so,” Rayner added, “All the same, it”s a beautiful city. It”s clean. It”s quiet. There”s a harmoniousness that you miss in the town.” He wondered if Ivar understood what he was talking about. “You can smell the sea.”

  Ivar said, “All the same.”

  “Yes,” Rayner said. “All the same.” He laughed.

  Out of the forest the scream of the cicadas hid the silence. A light wind was sieving through the trees, and he noticed that half the stars were lost in cloud. It was hard to believe that the wilderness and the capital coexisted in one country.

  “Did you see any of our gang?” Ivar asked. “Or have they all gone?”

  “Some have gone, some have stayed. Gerhard left ages ago …”

  “I know. We”ve kept in touch.”

  “But Leon and Jarmila are still there, although I didn”t see her.” He realized that he had purposely avoided Jarmila, who had once symbolized them all. “But Leon was a mess. He”d been in mental hospital.”

  “He was always pathetic.”

  “But he was sensitive and interesting. I don”t know what went wrong.” But whatever it was, Rayner thought, had gone wrong from the start. He remembered the lizard. “And I saw Miriam.”

  “Ah, Miriam.” She was the kind of girl Ivar called “a handful.” He and she had never much liked one another. He said, “She was tough.”

  “Tough?” Rayner let this fly away unchallenged, like something passing in the dark he could not grasp.

  Around them the soldiers were starting to extinguish their lamps. Some of them had pulled the linen envelopes from their sleeping bags as protection against the mosquitoes, and were stretched out beneath them. The night had cooled a little. Ivar continued to sit bare-chested, slapping the gnats as they landed on him, while Rayner sweated secretly under his shirt, and sensed himself advancing to a confrontation. One of the conscripts whimpered in his sleep, then went quiet. Over the soft earth of the camp”s perimeter the boots of the duty officer made the faintest, warning crunch as he moved from sentry to sentry. Soon theirs was the only lamp left shining. Now its light picked out all the rounded contours of Ivar”s face, everything so smooth and gradual in
it, folding one feature into the next. Rayner looked at him.

  “Where are we going?”

  Ivar”s tone never changed. “South-southeast.”

  Years and years of schoolboy power-play grated on Rayner as he said, “I think I know. There”s only one place on the map out here. A native holy place. You told me yourself.”

  Ivar said almost courteously, “It may be holy to them. They”ve got some war idol there.” “That was missionary talk.”

  “The missionaries were the only ones who”d been there.”

  “Plenty of natives go there,” Rayner said. “One old fellow even told me about it, said it was a place that used to connect their heaven with earth. He spoke of it as a kind of mourning site.”

  “That may be, but I never heard of it. Missionary reports tend to be reliable.” Ivar”s words fell so balanced, so reasonable, Rayner thought, they turned other people”s insane. And Ivar still had to retain the power of inflicting uncertainty when he added, “But I did not say that place was our objective.”

  Rayner felt the return of his fever in a faint, damp caress across his forehead. It seemed purposely to be reminding him of itself. He said, “Out here the native clans are all different from the ones near town. The old man told me some of the names, but I”ve forgotten them.” He had a fancy that the forest would echo them back. “Anyway, they”re different.”

  Ivar said, “But they”re still savages.”

  He had replaced his bush cap as if intentionally to shadow his face. But his body expressed him just as eloquently: a plastic trunk whose limbs showed little hair and no obvious muscle. All its parts flowed together, as if melded by subcutaneous fat, and made his movements boneless as a snake”s. Rayner imagined Zoë in his arms, and felt momentarily, wretchedly, estranged from her. His voice came angry:

  “So you think you”ve a right to kill any native you find? Are you planning to wipe out a few then, as a sop to the town? Get yourself promoted? Why don”t you drive back and get the bastards who murdered those farmers, instead of looking for a soft target?”