Turning Back the Sun Page 8

  Then, out of the gentle cleft between her breasts, he pulled a stream of silk turquoise. “There!”

  The boy simply gazed. He could not understand. Suddenly his mother seemed awesome to him, different. Bernard might be a wizard, but the repository of magic, of all these secret colors, was she. Why was Bernard the only one who knew that she carried this beauty with her? Had she not told his father? He fingered the satins on his knees. They seemed real. Even the turquoise one; but how did Bernard know she kept it there?

  Long afterwards he wondered how deeply Uncle Bernard had dipped his fingers into his mother”s cleft, but he could not be sure. And now Bernard was asking, “Will you be a conjuror when you grow up?”

  But Rayner was already stubborn. It was a private vow with him to be a lawyer. He whispered this out.

  “So he wants to follow his papa!” There was a glint of mockery in the voice. “Is he more like his papa or his mama?” Bernard”s face came circling round Rayner”s. “I think you should follow your mother. She”s a conjuror too, you know!” He took her hand, lifted it into the air, and as if from her fingertips there bloomed a silver cigarette case. “I think he”s more like his mother!”

  “That”s enough, Bernard,” she said.

  In Rayner”s memory the wonder and oddness of all this held a tinge of distress. He felt he was being moved against his father, against his will. He decided he did not like Uncle Bernard anymore. In those days his family could still afford a nurse, and he was glad, for once, when she was summoned to take him for a walk.

  Rayner said: “It was just harmless fun, of course. And soon afterwards Uncle Bernard faded out.”

  “Faded out?”

  “Yes, people did that in my parents” world.” It was the analyst”s silence which irritated him, Rayner thought. The man just sat there. “In any case, I realize now that my mother was not an attractive woman.”

  The analyst joked for the first time. “That”s always a matter of opinion!”

  “And after my father”s death she simply caved in. She didn”t seem to have anything left. She started drinking. It was pathetic, I know, but a sign of her love.”

  The man did not answer. His pen dangled over his notepad. He did not direct Rayner, did not suggest explanations, in fact never said anything definite at all. If he were not the only doctor practicing therapy in the town—psychoanalysis was such a young science here—Rayner would have gone elsewhere. “You may want a trauma from my childhood,” he said, “but I”m hard put to find you one. The nearest thing was a fire. When I was five we had a fire outbreak in the house one night. My father was away on business and my mother had to rescue me. I was dreaming I was on a railway station, but there was real smoke in my nostrils.”

  He was woken by his own coughing and by a woman howling somewhere. It was pitch dark, but he felt a new presence in the room: thick and pungent. He reached for his bedside lamp and as he switched it on the door flew open. The whole room seemed to be hung with gauze, and on the far side, a long way away, she was standing with her hands at her throat. She appeared as if she had already been through flames. Her hair hung wild, her clothes crumpled and her face and hands looked stained with soot. He began to cry. Then she came toward him, as if parting the gauze, and held out her arms. Her voice was husky with smoke. “Come to me.”

  The analyst was watching him. “So your mother rescued you.”

  “Yes. I can”t remember what happened after that…. We never spoke about it in the family afterwards.” “Why not?”

  “I don”t know … I can”t remember.”

  But his memory was like that; it splintered even recent events. Sometimes he could remember nothing of an encounter except a vivid, trivial detail. The whole heart and importance of the episode would have disappeared, leaving behind the nicotine on a man”s fingernails or the color of a child”s eyelashes. Only in remembering his absent friends did the details synthesize into full portraits, as though their minutiae had overlaid and reinforced one another. So Leon, with his delicate lips and rounded paleness, and fine-boned Jarmila in her fair waterfall of hair, assembled easily in his mind.

  And, of course, Miriam.

  The analyst, who normally let him ramble, asked, “What was so distinctive about this girl?”

  “She was very warm,” Rayner said at once. “It was expressed in her body. She was brown, vital.” His hands unfurled from his chest. “She had this special gift for drawing out … I can”t exactly explain.”

  “First love.” The doctor”s gaze was fixed on the wall beside him. “Very potent.”

  “Yes, and the place was right,” Rayner said forcefully. “I was brought up there. She belonged to that world. It was natural to us.” He did not know where the man”s hometown was, but he added austerely, “I think it”s simply better than anywhere else.”

  The analyst did not answer.

  Rayner wished he could articulate precisely what he felt, but he only said, “I think you belong with your past,” and the words, as he spoke them, became true. He was thinking, curiously, of the church at the end of their street in the capital, the whitewashed and pinnacled sanctuary in whose graveyard his parents were buried. Whether or not you believed (and Rayner did not), the building seemed to hold in focus all the social unity, the flow of past into future which he had lost. He knew it by heart: the plaster Virgin in her field of tapers; the Christus Victor on the altar; the memorial plaques to soldiers and priests (and even a state councillor): “Revered Memory … Prudens et Fidelis—the bones of … Vitae Morumque Exemplar …” it was the church of Miriam, Leon and Adelina. They”d been confessed and confirmed there as a row of giggling children. There he had lost his faith insidiously, without pain. But now that he was exiled in this pragmatic, near-atheist town, he realized that his childhood church had gathered up its citizens—dark-clothed and formal—and pointed them in a direction which had nothing to do with the town”s pragmatism. It looked out onto otherness, mystery.

  “Everybody was there.” Miriam glowed by his hospital bedside. “Even the side chapels were full.”

  Rayner, dazed by concussion and chloroform, only now understood that she was talking about his mother”s funeral. She bent down and kissed him. He said, “What about the autopsy?”

  “Oh, that was clear. Were you worried?”

  “You knew her, poor mama. I hope nobody detected … alcohol.”

  “Good heavens, no!” Suddenly her hands were caressing his cheeks. He was too weak to touch her. He simply stared. Her brimming body belonged so extravagantly to the wondrous species of the healthy. Her face came smiling high above his. She said, “She was cleared of all blame. How good to be the first to tell you!” Her fingers started a teasing tattoo along his plastered leg. “You were hit by one of those armored state postal vans. Their drivers are all mad.”

  Rayner was to realize only by degrees that his mother was dead. Now he felt that by surviving, he had abandoned her. And there had been no goodbye. He tried to smile at Miriam. If only he could have gone to the funeral, he felt, that would have been a kind of farewell.

  “It was right you didn”t go.” She lifted her chin. “It would have been cruel. Why put yourself through that? It”s better to remember happiness. Actually, I hate funerals. I think they”re morbid and pointless. It”s better to look back on the good things.”

  Three times afterwards Rayner had returned to the church and sat at the rear of the empty nave, looking toward the altar. Like that, it reimposed its mystique, and there was room for God in it.

  The church had awed him since childhood. Once, as a boy of ten, he had wandered in alone. He had never seen it empty before, and became afraid of the tap of his feet on the tiles. The tapers under the Virgin had gone out. But the stained-glass saints glared at him from their sun, and the memorial plaques were dripping plaster veils and fear. He tiptoed into the chancel. From their corbels he was being watched by painted angels” faces, with headbands and girlish hair. On the altar”s golden
crucifix the eyes of the hanging Christ blazed out under a crown of thorns and glory. They did not see him.

  On an impulse Rayner took out of his pocket the crystal given him by a scrawny waif called Anna. It was scarcely bigger than a marble, but when you shook it the glass filled with snowflakes. This mystery (he had never seen snow) and his wonder at the girl turned it unique. Gingerly he placed it at the foot of the implacable-looking Christ, and backed away. He might have meant it as an offering or a claim for Anna: a stake in holiness. He was not sure.

  Next Sunday, at mass, he saw it still on the altar—a secret blasphemy—and nobody noticing. But he looked at it with despair. During the intervening days it seemed to have been sucked away from him into the aura of the crucifix. He had planned to recover it, full of manna from its adventure. But he did not dare. It was infected too deeply with the magic of the chancel, through lying hour after hour under the nailed and golden feet, bathed in the stained-glass cross fire of the saints. It had withdrawn from him. Yet for all he knew the pang of loss he felt was for the girl, who was not in church that morning, so that the crystal seemed to have returned into God, and she with it, leaving him on the far side.

  CHAPTER

  11

  As the disease spread, and the rains did not come, the town simmered in suspension. A surface normality reigned, but a new energy went into preserving it. Even in the streets people walked with a look of responsibility, as if embattled, and their talk was edgy. Tiny distress signals multiplied. A few weeks earlier, anything thought indigenous to the land—from banana fiber to sweet potatoes—had shown a price tag stamped with a smiling native. These had now vanished; and the shops which once displayed native-woven mats and baskets were selling other things.

  Everybody knew that the situation had outstripped the police, and that decisions now rested with the army. Their jeep patrols rumbled out into the country every morning, scouring the stock-breeding lands at the foot of the mountains, and sometimes at sunset, if you saw them return, you would glimpse the blank face of a captured savage among the soldiery. There were random arrests at night, usually in the dry riverbeds along the town”s outskirts. But almost nobody witnessed them. And nobody asked if the natives were returned. After a rumor that their dogs were spreading the disease, all strays were shot on sight. Yet there was no official curfew, and every morning people would wake to a new swathe of graffiti blazoned across public buildings. The latest of them, inscribed on the walls of the telephone exchange, simply said: “Kill them.”

  Rayner spent more time than usual operating the erratic radiotelegraph which connected his clinic with outlying cattle stations. Many farming people only needed reassurance, but he could not truthfully give it. Their women came in pregnant from the stations now at thirty-five weeks, begging for beds. He never got away from work before dusk.

  After a week of such days he emerged from his clinic to find an army staff car waiting for him. Its driver said, “There”s a job for you up at barracks, sir.” He hated being at the military”s disposal, but Leszek was too old and nervous to go. So he climbed into the car, with a vague foreboding.

  In the twilight the town was closing itself down. They left behind the expensive stucco villas with their flimsy wrought iron and frangipani trees, and entered a poorer district. People had already abandoned the streets. Through the slats of their shanties, lifted on concrete stilts above the termites, faint lamplight showed or jazz drifted. Their tin roofs were rusting to shreds, and the gardens rampaged with dogs. The sun set in a torrid blur, as it had for weeks. To Rayner, feverish with humidity, it seemed that only the rain could restore this place, and cleanse the air of fear.

  Instead of a lounging duty guard, two armed sentries monitored them at the gates. They drove on under searchlights across a tarmac parade ground, where twelve-pound field guns flanked an empty flagstaff, then on through a military police compound, and stopped outside the army surgeon”s door. The driver said, “It”s through there.”

  At that moment the door swung open and Ivar came out. “Rayner! I didn”t want to trouble you”—he squeezed his hand—”but one of the prisoners needs medical attention. You”ll understand when you see him.” Ivar looked suavely regretful, as if he had caused some embarrassment. “I have to go, but the lieutenant will advise you.”

  So Rayner went in alone. The room was stifling. It was more like a prison cell than a surgery. A white-draped bed under a powerful overhead lamp did service as an operating table, and the medicine shelves showed lines of yellowing labels and discolored lints. The prisoner was sitting in a chair facing the Intelligence lieutenant, while between them stood a stout corporal, one of the half-breed natives whom the army used as trackers and interpreters.

  “The prisoner fell during a fight with another inmate,” the lieutenant said. “I don”t think it”s too serious.”

  Rayner stooped to examine the man. He was a young savage with a flat, brutal face. His eyes were charcoal slits. Down from his left eyebrow ploughed a jagged, three-inch gash. Its blood still soaked his shirt.

  Rayner asked casually, “Where did you collect this man?”

  “He was hanging around one of the farms upriver. He had a gun. We took him in as a precaution.” The lieutenant”s voice fluted and cooed. “Then he lost his head.”

  Rayner straightened and said, “I”ll need ether for this.”

  “You”ve handled this size of wound before, haven”t you?”

  “Yes, but not under these conditions.” He hunted the surgeon”s shelves, but there were no ether masks, not even chloroform, and half the bottles were empty or unlabelled.

  “What”s wrong with just sterilizing it?” The lieutenant”s voice tinkled on his girl”s lips. But his eyes were saying: It”s only a savage. They don”t feel anything.

  “It”ll need extra care.” Rayner thought: Perhaps it”s surer, the man may be more frightened of ether than of the needle. He asked the interpreter, “Tell him to lie on the bed. Tell him that I”m a doctor and that I”m going to sew his skin together again.”

  The interpreter took the savage”s arm and guided him to the operating table. His native speech sounded crazed to unaccustomed ears. It lurched between bunched consonants and a hoarse torrent of phonemes. He seemed to be abusing the prisoner, but no expression arrived on either of their faces. The man might have heard nothing at all. But he followed the corporal”s arm to the bed, and lay down. His hair bushed round his head like a pillow.

  Rayner asked, “Does he understand you? Are you from the same clan?”

  The interpreter said, “He”s from the Ningumiri. But he understands me all right. He”s just not meeting us.”

  When Rayner started cleaning the wound, the prisoner did not stir, only stared up at the lamp. It was the face of a pitiless statue. The only signs of its unease were the vertical ridges which lifted faintly in the center of the forehead. But in this brighter light Rayner could see that the skin around the wound was minutely, evenly serrated, as if it had been sawed. He asked, “What actually caused this?”

  The lieutenant said, “He fell.”

  “But what hit him? What did it? This isn”t compatible with a fall.”

  “I don”t know. I wasn”t there.” The lieutenant”s tone had tightened. “Is it relevant?”

  “Yes it is.” Rayner felt a prick of anger. “If I knew the answer I”d be able to assess the chances of infection.” He turned to the interpreter. “Ask the prisoner what caused this.”

  The interpreter”s eyes flicked to the lieutenant, and back. Then he turned to the native and resumed his bursts of vowels and glottal consonants. Rayner was aware that he might have been saying anything, and that neither he nor the lieutenant would know. Perhaps, Rayner imagined, the corporal”s own savage heritage was more potent than his white blood, and he was saying: “Stay silent. These whites are all bastards.” Or maybe his army uniform obliterated any racial fellow-feeling: “If you answer the doctor”s question, we”ll beat the hell out of yo
u.”

  Whatever he said, no reply came. The savage went on staring at the ceiling as if he were deaf. Yet somewhere behind those sunk eyes, Rayner sensed, the man understood. It was apparent in the set of his full, belligerent mouth.

  Rayner leaned over him and tried to see into his eyes. He demanded, “Tell me, what hit you?”

  The lieutenant stirred behind him. But the savage never moved. The corporal, for some reason, was smiling.

  Rayner mistrusted the surgeon”s implements, and used his own. As he dipped his needle into the half-numbed skin, he did not know what the native”s reaction would be. But again there was none. Rayner might as well have been stitching the man”s clothes. Only when he adjusted the overhead lamp, lowering it closer to the bed, the ridges on the native”s forehead trembled with sudden fear and his eyes opened to show bloodshot whites. But the moment Rayner resumed his stitching, drawing the skin over the raw wound, the man”s face resettled into its black halo of hair, and seemed at peace.

  The sweat started trickling from Rayner”s forehead into his eyes. By the time he had finished, he felt unnaturally exhausted. He packed his implements back into his case without a word.

  The lieutenant said, “We know we can count on your discretion.”

  Rayner snapped, “You”re lucky you can.” But he realized that the statement was meaningless. Nobody in the town would care what happened in this prison, and some would feel a secret pleasure. He wiped the sweat from his lips and touched the prisoner”s shoulder, uncomprehended.

  “Rest now.”

  The same staff car was waiting outside to drive him back. The streets were deserted. Their few lamps spread dangerous pools of light in the dark. The whole town had gone silent, locked in its private dreams and nightmares. A three-quarter moon hung overhead, and a few of the desert deer had strayed in and were grazing on the verges.

  Rayner must have let out an involuntary groan, because the driver turned round and said, “Are you all right, sir?”