Turning Back the Sun (4 page)

T
he partition wall in Rayner”s clinic gave out a relentless thudding, as if someone were beating it with his fist. From the far side he heard the voice of his colleague Leszek, raised in anxiety. But the thudding went on like a threatened heartbeat, and beneath it the voice of a man: “I want to know. I have the right to know.”

Rayner tried to concentrate on his own patient, a four-month-old baby who had spewed up all night, his mother said. The woman”s voice was gravelly, suspicious. The baby had not been registered. The thudding next door continued, but the talking had died. His examination cleared the baby, but disclosed quinsy in the mother. The thudding rose to a crescendo. There was a noise of splintered glass.

When he flung open his door onto the reception area he saw the usual listless quadrangle of patients, sitting on quilts against the walls, waiting. But in his partner”s room a coarse, heavy-built man hovered tempestuously above the examination couch, where a broken glass had fallen or been dashed from somebody”s hand. His fist still belabored the wall, but it was impossible to tell if he were
threatening or protecting the woman who lay there. She stared at the ceiling with a face of abject tiredness.

Leszek looked at Rayner with open relief, and turned to the man. “This is my partner. He will give you a second opinion.” His voice trembled. “Really, I can”t say anything more, because I simply don”t know. We will have to carry out tests.”

“Tests?” The man looked as if he were being cheated. “What in hell can they tell you that you don”t know already?”

Leszek took off his glasses as if he no longer wanted to see. He touched Rayner”s shoulder. “The patient complains of intermittent fever and lassitude. I”ve carried out my examination, and taken a blood sample. There”s nothing obviously wrong. The patient has a skin discoloration, which is causing her husband concern. She”s noticed it for six weeks …”

Rayner leaned over to examine her. The husband”s stare dug into the back of his neck. She was one of those townswomen whose faces had outrun their bodies, leaving her features lined and sallow above a still young figure. Her arms were crossed over her breasts in embarrassment. She whispered, “It”s disgusting.”

Rayner eased her hands to her sides, then stifled his surprise. Between her breasts and out from her armpits spread a dark pigmentation which he”d never seen before. It looked like liquid chocolate. Its edges ended abruptly, leaving nothing between itself and the whiteness of the normal skin.

He did not know what to say. It did not look like a fungal disease, but he asked, “Have you felt any irritation?” The woman was silent. “Does it itch?”

The husband said, “Of course it itches.”

“Let her answer.” Rayner excluded him with his back.

But the woman only echoed wanly, “Of course it itches.”

No wonder, Rayner thought. Either she or her husband
had lacerated its whole surface, as if with sandpaper. “You should have left this alone.”

“How could I?” The husband barged in beside him. “Look at it.
Look at it!”

Rayner was growing angry. “Did you think it would
come off,
or what? Now will you let me complete my examination?”

But there was nothing left to examine. Leszek had smeared the rash with gentian violet, but Rayner felt sure now that it was not fungal. He did not know what it was. He imagined it must spring from some hormonal imbalance, or be the benign result of nerve-cell tumors. But it did not resemble anything in his experience.

The man said, “Well?”

“I”ve got nothing to add,” Rayner said. “We”ll await tests.” The woman sat up shakily, pulling on her dress. “Once we”ve established the cause, your skin will return to normal with treatment.”

“Who the fuck are you telling?” The man”s fists were flailing at his sides. “That disease isn”t curable, is it? Are you saying you can change it back to white? You come clean with me, doctor, that”s the savage disease, isn”t it?” He rammed his kepi back on his head and glared at the woman. “That”s one fucking low disease.”

Rayner turned on him. “Who says it”s a savage”s disease? Where did you hear that?”

The man said, “It”s around town. It”s spreading.”

What was spreading, Rayner wondered, the disease or the fallacy of its origin? He said, “This is the first case I”ve seen.”

“Well I”
ve
heard of others.” The man pushed his wife away from him. “Another woman … two other women. And d”you know why they don”t report it? Because they”ve been going with
them,
that”s why.”

The woman began to sob. Leszek put out a hand to her, withdrew it.

“You”ve been listening to fairy tales.” Rayner lost his
temper. “Is this town going mad, or what? This condition can”t be sexually transmitted, so don”t punish your wife with your ignorance!” If the woman had not been there he would have added: it may be a symptom of cancer. But instead he said, “What do you know about disease? Anything at all?” The man was silent. “Then listen to doctors and not to eyewash.”

But the man”s bluster concealed an animal fear, he knew. Rayner knew because he felt the same fear, faintly, in himself: an irrational tremor of unease. The discoloration was only a symptom of inner disorder, of course, but the singularity of its deep shade and outline disturbed him as if it were some magic.

The woman was trying to put on her shoes, but in her weakness she could not buckle them. Rayner bent down and helped her. He squeezed her arm. “It”s not a crime to be ill.”

After they had gone, Leszek gazed at him. “I don”t understand.” He lifted the blood sample to the window light, as if his naked eye might discern something strange. Normally he did not ask Rayner for advice, but now he said, “What do you think?”

Rayner said brusquely, remembering the reception area full of patients, “It”s probably hormonal.” He suddenly did not want to think about it.

“I don”t believe that.” Leszek”s face—a landscape of too-thin bones and tissues—was accusing him. “And you don”t think so, really?”

“It”s impossible to tell.” Now he was treating Leszek as if his partner had contracted some contagion. Leszek had always been too susceptible, he thought: a taxing mixture of frailty and pride.

Leszek turned away and repeated thinly, “It”s not hormonal.”

Rayner noticed that his head was trembling. But his partner had always been like that, he thought—over-imaginative. Leszek”s past, haunted by czarist Russia, had
taught him to fear. Years ago, Rayner remembered, Leszek had lent him one of his old suitcases, the battered luggage of his refugee years, and Rayner had seen that it was glazed with shallow scorch marks. Methodically, scrupulously, Leszek must have burnt away all the labels stuck to it, so that nobody would be able to tell from where he had come.

I
f the town had a heart—and cynics doubted this—it beat in the mall. All the town”s nervous sense of purpose, its buoyancy, its latent unease, emanated outwards from this paved half-kilometer of hectic commerce and social rendezvous. Its long bars were always packed. The restaurants flaunted expatriate cuisine, and enfiladed the passing crowds with the lilt of Irish ceilidh or Neapolitan songs. Their names were all of other places: the Vienna Café, the Taj Mahal, London Restaurant, the Temple of Heaven…. Anywhere but here. Yet here, in the illusion of the town”s heart, a practical zeal seemed to unite the marching mass of pedestrians. Even the Babel of immigrant languages had merged into the town”s own coarse, quick lingo. Walking by twos and threes, they laughed together. The economy was running high this year. Only when alone, the familiar tension surfaced in their tight mouths and stares.

Nobody looked at the savages perched on their steps and benches, but Rayner knew they no longer went unnoticed. The murders in outlying farms, which had risen to four, had sent an ambiguous frisson through the town—a
mixture of fear, half-pleasurable excitement, and underlying anger. Only the natives seemed oblivious of this, and still wandered the streets with their frowns furrowed at something else, and sang their songs at night along the river.

Rayner never walked in the mall without thinking: here I am in the core of the town, and
this is all there is.
The townspeople were so oddly dedicated to their lives, so vigorous and motivated. They had successfully turned their backs on anything but themselves. Sometimes he felt as if he had aged unbearably here. Once or twice, when he could snatch ten minutes from his rounds, he had simply sat in the mall and watched it.

Even in May, with the heat intensifying, the date palms and hibiscus made pools of scent and shadow, and along the benches beneath them an audience of old men in shorts and wide-brimmed hats monitored the bustle. Rayner wondered what they were seeing. They resembled some ancient theatrical chorus. Years of harsh sun had driven the glitter of life deep inside their skulls. In them the town seemed to be watching itself, but with blank eyes.

Rayner snatched his lunch at Nielsen”s Baked Potato kiosk, a portable oven rigged up like a caravan. Its cook was a gentle-mannered savage girl (who was to disappear in time), one of the rare natives to have taken work in town. He wanted to ask if people had changed towards her, but instead took his potato in its paper cup and walked away.

In the mall”s center a chess tournament was in progress. Everywhere but here the thoroughfare was paved with small, lava-like blocks, but under the central clump of palms and daturas the black and white paving slabs formed the board for giant chessmen. Across it the local masters prowled among their wooden pieces as if personally implicated in their fate. But the queens” and knights” faces had been worn away, so the players looked
as if they were moving pigs and logs about, and even the spectators were mostly down-at-heel.

Rayner did not know why the back of the woman”s head in front of him looked familiar: the dancer”s hair seized back into an auburn scallop. Then she turned and he saw Zoë. She accused him laughingly, “You never stayed for my dance!”

“I did. But I went soon afterwards.” How extraordinary she looked, he thought, flawlessly made up at noon as if she had attended some state function. “I thought your dance was the only good thing of the evening.”

“Did you?” She sounded tentative now, so that he remembered how girlish she had become when her hair was unloosed. “You came on a bad night. I didn”t dance it well. And there were thugs in the audience.”

The crowd had edged them back against some café tables, mingling them with customers, and Rayner asked her to join him for coffee with a naturalness which vaguely surprised him. The moment they were seated he imagined how incongruous they must look: he so awkward and carelessly dressed, she high-colored and immaculate. If it were not for the severity of her dancer”s hair, he thought, people might have taken her for a high-class prostitute. As it was, she glittered incongruously in the dowdiness, and he sensed that she was enjoying the attention she was drawing—something he didn”t like in her.

He said, “That club must be a tough place to work, isn”t it?”

“Yes, but it”s a good stage—a deep stage—did you notice? And they let me do what I like … probably because they don”t care.” She laughed, then said with a sudden, edgy intensity: “So I choose the music, create the movements, then dance them. It may not seem much, but it”s better than what most people get.”

In her voice the lisping cadence peculiar to the capital still mellowed the strident dialect of the town. But this passion for dance, for sheer movement to music, was mysterious
to Rayner. Even before he was lamed, he had never danced much.

She said, “You don”t understand, do you? I can tell you don”t.” She looked at him, disappointed. “But that club was better once. We did satire and jazz.”

“Why did you stay on?”

“Why?” She looked as if she had never questioned it. “I suppose dancing is something I
have
to do. It”s the kind of … energy—joining the music …”

Rayner stared back at her, wondering. He”d never wanted to join the music like that. Music turned him still. To him this woman seemed richly, accusingly young.

“It”s just in the body,” she said.

He remembered her body then, how it looked in the outrageous leotard. Even sitting here, she seemed to exist in a unique dimension, at once more precarious and straightforward than his own, and fuller-blooded. The passersby on the mall evoked a gale of comment and curiosity from her. “Look at
that
one…. How do people allow themselves to look like that, d”you think? … What a
beautiful
dog, did you see the dog? … Now
there”s
a good-looking woman…. Do you play chess? … If black doesn”t castle he”ll lose…. Oh how extraordinary,
look! …”

Her observations of people—men and women—were openly sensuous. She would admire their legs or necks, their skin color, the way they walked. And when Arab music sounded from a nearby restaurant, her body began to sway. “I love that music, don”t you?”

Rayner never heard Arab singing without being struck by its exile. It belonged so deeply somewhere else, like the long-faced Syrians in their restaurant. But Zoë seemed to hear and see things in cleansing isolation, enjoying or dismissing them purely for themselves. He started to envy this a little. It was innocently healing. He found himself delighting in her earthiness, her gaiety.

“You should laugh more,” she said suddenly. “You”re getting the wrong lines.”

“What?”

She ran her fingers down his cheeks. “Your lines are starting to go the wrong way. They”re perpendicular.”

He laughed again, and found his fingers momentarily touching her cheekbones.

Hers was, he realized later, a deeply contradictory face. The dancer”s immaculacy and vividness most forcefully expressed her, a type of optimism. But beneath the blue compelling eyes and thin nose her mouth twisted up at the corners in a shy assertion of charm. He sat beside her feeling old, but bathed in her exuberance.

“It”s too late for me to get smile lines.”

He had paid the bill but realized he did not want to leave. Even in so constricted a town as this, it might be months before he encountered her again. It was not just her beauty which drew him, but her liberating, animal naturalness, and the half-discerned fragility beneath it. She seemed to need him.

So instead of saying, “I have to go now,” he heard himself ask her, “How long have you been here?”

“Nearly ten years. I came from the capital.”

“I thought so. Your accent.”

“I wish I could lose it. It sounds so affected.”

Rayner was surprised. “It”s musical. Better than the one here.”

“I prefer the accent here. I find it strong, very emphatic.” She harshened and deepened her words. “You”re from the capital too …”

“Yes.”

She was looking at him almost tenderly. “Did you leave family there?”

“No. My parents were dead when I left. Did you?”

He had no idea what she would answer. She existed so fiercely in her own right that her past was unimaginable. She seemed to live as she herself experienced things—torn up from all associations. He could not envisage her parents. If she had said her father was a factory worker or
a government minister, he would not have been surprised.

“My people were schoolteachers from the coast.” She gave a sad laugh, as if acknowledging the incongruity. “I drove them mad from the start, I was such a rebel. When they got angry, they”d call me “the changeling.” Later, I won a scholarship to the dance academy in the capital, and now we don”t even exchange letters anymore.” She lifted her chin with an odd, hurt self-command. “There isn”t any point.”

He wondered how she had ended up here, but did not like to ask.

She was sitting self-consciously upright now, embattled. “When I left the academy there weren”t many jobs.” She added simply, “Later I came here.”

Her account—they both knew—resounded with gaps and silences; but he sensed that hers was a past less of scandal than of wilfulness and rebellion, and maybe of political naïvety. She”d simply gone her own way, and had perhaps arrived here by default.

She asked, “What about you? Are you married?”

He shook his head.

She said, “I”ve noticed you before in the streets. You”re always on your own.” “I”m a doctor.”

“Yes, I know …” She was not flirting with him, but he wondered what had elicited this tinge of condolence. What did he look like in the streets? Just overworked, he imagined. But occasionally he had caught sight of himself in a shop mirror—taking his reflection by surprise—and had glimpsed a face more gaunt and hard than the one he had reckoned on.

Zoë said astonishingly, “You don”t look happy.” Her accent had slid back into the lilt of the capital.

“Happy?” He burst into contradictory laughter. “Yes, I”m happy sometimes, when I”m not thinking about it. On a good day, I”m happy working.” He glanced at his watch. He was already ten minutes late.

But it was hard—ludicrously hard—to let this woman go, just to say, “Goodbye, then,” and to carry on. His own indecision surprised him. His hands were toying with the tablecloth. Then he and Zoë stood up together.

He said, “Come and have supper one evening after you”ve finished dancing.”

She looked momentarily surprised, and for another instant gazed at him rather gravely, as if assessing something. Then she said, “I”d like that.”