Turning Back the Sun (8 page)

When he returned he stood watching her in the faint light, as if in sleep she might divulge some clue to herself. She lay on her side. From her rather small face the hair streamed back over the pillows, and her right arm was extended in front of her as if hunting for him (or someone) on the other side of the bed. Sleep had withdrawn her into herself. She breathed heavily. And as she lay there, her mouth”s curves faintly smiling, she seemed in her privacy to be integrated at last—this harlequin woman who maddened and touched and puzzled him—as if all the disparate threads of her had been drawn together by sleep, and no longer needed explanation.

T
he latent disquiet which had trickled through the town began to spread out in a miasma of rumor and fear. The insidious advance of the disease—and it became “common knowledge” that it was bred by the savages—spilled into Rayner”s clinic in a spate of false alarms. Along with the genuine cases—a bank clerk and an eleven-year-old girl—his workload was doubled by healthy people who complained of malaise or eye-ache, or imagined that their skin moles had changed texture and were spreading.

Rumors grew that the savages were infiltrating the town at night, and were exacerbated by the murder of a man in an alley just off the mall. The multiple injuries to his head had been inflicted by axe blows, and he was half stripped. There were whispers of other murders which the authorities had covered up to forestall panic.

Rayner”s apprehension at the natives descended on him again. But one night, too, he woke up from a nightmare of white killers flowering all over the town, as people deflected suspicion by murdering one another with axes. Outside his windows he could see the natives” fires
still burning along the river, but the police had stepped up their patrols, and often moved in threes along the bank now, flashlights in hand, while their ghostly launch cruised behind.

Fewer people went out at night. On the outskirts, thick padlocks hung from the compound gates, and more dogs than before had been released into the arid gardens. By day the signs of unease were growing. The public benches and doorways were still scattered with natives, but outside private offices and shops the warning notices multiplied: “No waiting on steps,” “No lingering.” From time to time, as if to show that something was being done, one of the younger savages would be arrested in the street and taken off for questioning.

Remembering what the old native had said, Rayner prayed only that the rains would come and fill up the water holes. But every morning revealed the same sultry sky. It seemed to wrap the earth in gauze. Even the birds which flew in it looked suffocated. Rayner, whose foot injury had barred him from military conscription, was liable instead to emergency secondment in the medical corps, and several times found himself attached to jeep patrols among the outlying farms. He saw nothing but sere grass and haggard cattle. Most of the water holes had been sucked dry, and even the streams shrivelled. The only savages he glimpsed were stick figures on the horizon, grazing their bullocks in the thorns.

Soon afterwards the garrison commander, a taciturn major, invited him for a drink. He accepted half-heartedly. The infantry company was a patchy unit, whose soldiers had occasionally been jailed for brawling. He found himself in an ambience of bored masculinity, at once harsh and puerile. A few officers were downing beer or whisky in the major”s married quarters. Ivar was not among them, and the only women—a pair of sad-faced wives—soon disappeared. Rayner knew that he had not
been invited casually, and he was not surprised when a shifty-faced lieutenant of Intelligence prevented him from leaving.

“The commander has a favor to ask,” he said. “In a way it”s a formality.”

As the other guests left, the major opened a door and beckoned Rayner into a spare bedroom. The lieutenant followed, saying, “Captain Gencer assured us we could count on your discretion.”

Rayner disliked being compromised by Ivar this way. The bedroom was bare except for basic furniture. As they entered, a small, sallow-skinned man, whom Rayner recognized as the company”s medical officer, jumped to his feet and half saluted. How long he had been sitting there was a mystery.

The lieutenant began with absurd delicacy. “The commander has a
condition.”

Rayner suddenly knew what was coming. The army doctor was picking tensely at his lapels. The major sat down on the bed and started unbuttoning his jacket. One of the buttons pattered onto the floor.

“The commander …” The lieutenant went on speaking for him as if the major were some god or mute. The subaltern”s mouth did not seem to belong to the owner of his cold eyes. It enunciated nervously under a thin, charred-looking moustache. “The commander wishes to know if it is similar to the disease which is spreading in the town.”

The major was lying on the bed now, stripped to the waist, and watching Rayner through watery eyes. In his big, almost hairless head all the features looked incidental, like flaws in stone. It was a strong face, but tired.

“I”ve given the commander a check-up,” the army surgeon said. “But we”ve had no experience in the army with this … epidemic.” He looked abject, as if he were personally responsible for the major”s disease.

But Rayner, leaning over the patient, saw at once.
Down from his left collar bone and delicately circling the nipple, the rash curled in a malignant-looking river to the base of the rib cage. It followed the same route as it had in the eleven-year-old girl, but whereas it had lain on her skin with a shocking clarity, on the forty-eight-year-old major”s it moved across a blemished patchwork of hair and fat lines and freckles.

Rayner examined the man”s eyeballs, the insides of his mouth, but knew the answer already: nothing. The major”s stare never left him.

The lieutenant said, “The commander wonders if the rash is similar?”

“Yes, identical.”

The major spoke for the first time. His voice, for so big a man, came small and tense. “What
is
this disease, doctor?” And Rayner, looking at his eyes and sucked-in lips, recognized the sound for what it was: the fear of death.

He said, “The truth is, major, we don”t know.” But he saw in the man beneath him—in his practical, unreflecting face—a kind of resentment. Whatever the propaganda about his key military post, he was a man in his late forties occupying a dead-end job in a provincial town, and Rayner thought he could hear anger inside that stone carapace of a head. Was this all there was to be?

He felt sorry for him. “As far as we can tell, the infection limits itself.” He tapped the major”s chest. “Initially the skin pigment changes, but then it stops. There”s no development. And the blood shows nothing. At the moment the municipality is trying to trace a common source of infection. In these near-drought conditions, the obvious culprit is the water supply. Tests here haven”t yielded results, but samples have been sent up to the state laboratories in the capital, and we”re awaiting a verdict.”

As he was speaking the major repeated, “… limited infection … no development … samples to the capital …” Rayner wondered how stupid he was. The major grabbed
at the information as it flew by, then docketed it away, shorn of complexities.

Rayner asked: “Is there anything you can help me with? Anything unusual you might have shared with other people recently? Food, perhaps, or anything new?”

The major slowly shook his head. “Only the air coolers.”

“Air coolers?”

The lieutenant said, “They”re a new invention, doctor. They keep premises cool by some method … changing the air. They”re better than fans.”

The major sat up and ran his hands cautiously over his chest. “We”re the first to get them. In the barracks.”

So they offered no solution. Rayner asked the major, “Is there anywhere perhaps you”ve been?”

The lieutenant tensed. “I don”t think that”s a proper question, doctor.”

The major had revived now and was pulling on his jacket. “What do you mean?” He looked angry.

Rayner burst into laughter. “Good god, I didn”t mean to imply …!” His embarrassment detonated round the room. “No! Hahaha! I know there”s a lot of gossip in town about … hahah … but this disease can”t be sexually transmitted …” He clapped him on the shoulder. “You can go anywhere you like, major!”

A phantom smile came to the major”s lips. He said, “Those women … they”re not my sort, doctor,” then he too started to laugh in a deep, gusty release of nerves, and the room relaxed. The lieutenant”s soft mouth snickered, while his eyes watched. Rayner went on chortling. Even the surgeon coughed into the palm of one hand.

In this jittery bloom of laughter the major got to his feet restored. “Thank you.” He buttoned his jacket firmly, walked to the front door and clasped their hands. It was as if laughter had cleansed away not only their mutual tensions, but the whole native threat, and the epidemic itself. Yet Rayner had simply confirmed what the major had feared, that this was “the savage plague.” For the
moment, it was in abeyance. But what it would become, he could not assess. Perhaps it would remain as it was, an enigmatic mark, whose slight, accompanying malaise would fade away.

As they left, the lieutenant said, “You understand the need for secrecy on this, doctor?”

“Patients” complaints are always confidential.”

The subaltern went silent, then said, “But this is exceptional. If it became known, it would destroy confidence.”

Rayner said irritably, “Perhaps.” In fact he felt that if the major were publicly to admit to the disease, it would lessen its stigma. He curtly said goodnight. He had a sense that the lieutenant was trying to coerce him in some way, to occupy his conscience, and he felt vaguely contaminated. Because the lieutenant insisted on it, the silence he would keep no longer seemed quite moral.

T
hey went round and round. Outside the window of their airborne car the funfair lights and the lights of the city streamed together. They huddled inwards, as if at the vortex of a whirlpool, clasping hands. Their knees touched. Because his father was laughing, Rayner imagined that this was his earliest memory; he could not remember his father laughing afterwards. But he was sure of the sound even now—it was guttural, like his own—and the three pairs of linked hands were vivid in his mind. Beyond the lace cuffs fashionable then, the sheen of his mother”s fingernails covered his palm, and he recalled the black hairs dusting the back of his father”s fist as it enclosed his, and thinking about the mystery of being adult. Probably they circled no more than two meters up in the air, but to him they were spinning into night. A trinity of hands.

“How fast are we going? A
hundred
kilometers!” And he heard his scream of excitement, because it was dangerous, and he was safe.

The analyst asked, “Your father wasn”t a happy man?” Rayner, surprised by his own answer, said, “I don”t
know.” If only he had lived a few years longer—but he”d died with his enigma intact. “I think he was happy in his work. He was a dour man. Twenty years older than my mother. He always seemed very assured. I expect he calmed my mother just by being himself. I remember our home as very placid, yes, happy, I think …”

The man asked, “You had other relatives?”

“Only one. My father”s sister.”

But the house had not been empty, exactly. It had seemed to be visited by people half sketched-in. It was irritating how dimmed they were: family friends, honorary relatives. Nobody important. Except perhaps “Uncle” Bernard. And even him Rayner remembered as a shadowy
habitué
rather than a distinct presence. He looked a little like his father but kindlier, weaker; and Rayner recalled the gifts he gave more clearly than the man himself: a wooden engine and four carriages with a guard at the back waving a flag; a clockwork acrobat who sprang from his feet to his hands like a jumping bean, until one day he stayed bent double.

“Poor fellow,” said Uncle Bernard. “I think he”s dead.”

Then, to console him, Bernard showed Rayner conjuring tricks. Perhaps that was his job, the boy thought, he seemed to have no other. Sometimes he spent whole afternoons at their house.

“Look! Do you see this penknife? Watch
carefully.
Now where”s it gone? … You”re sure? … No, here!”

For that hour he transfigured himself into a wizard. He poured rice out of empty bowls and described the card which the boy held hidden in his hand. But it was the handkerchiefs which Rayner remembered most distinctly. Did the boy know, asked Uncle Bernard, that his mother was haunted by beautiful colors? He pulled back the sleeves theatrically from his thin hands. Rayner”s mother was sitting between them in a summer dress. She was always animated when Bernard came, and now she was laughing in advance.

“There! … There! … and there!” He plucked them from her ears, from her hair, from the nape of her neck: brilliant-colored satin kerchiefs which dropped in the boy”s lap. It was mesmerizing. Rayner could scarcely track the fingers flashing back and forth. Nor could his mother. Her hands followed Bernard”s, trying to stop him, but her laughter bubbled up as if she were being tickled. She looked beautiful, he thought.

Even Bernard seemed carried away. “And there”s one scarf left. The blue one! Where does she keep the blue one?”

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.