Turning Back the Sun

by Colin Thubron

  The girl spread their quilt on the floor and squatted down. From her cord bag she drew out a long dish packed with tubers, two little bark spoons and a bone knife. Rayner watched her in fascination. She might have been alone. He had the impression that because for thousands of years her people had experienced only the wilderness and one another, a white face scarcely registered with her, and did not meaningfully exist. After a minute he and Zoë realized not that their own presence was intrusive but that they were simply no longer being seen, and they closed the door softly behind them.

  But late that night Rayner was woken by something. He eased out of bed without disturbing Zoë. He heard the stutter of a distant motor, then nothing. As he parted the curtains and stared down at the river, he made out the dimmed lights of an army patrol among the trees. They went in utter silence, furtively. He watched as their lamps rose diagonally up the slope and passed before the house without a sound. Then they dwindled along the crest of the ridge toward the bloodwood copse. As he gazed, they vanished and reemerged where the slope met the skyline, then one by one they disappeared.

  During the following week the natives were so quiet in the house that Rayner often forgot they were there. All day, with scarcely a change of posture, they would rest on their haunches in the grass outside the back door, facing the trees. Sometimes the old man would doze off like this, bolt upright, his eyebrows descended like pelmets almost onto his cheeks. Occasionally Rayner would find him smoking hemp leaves in a little bamboo pipe, perforated like a flute. At first he moved to stop this, then let him dream in peace.

  Meanwhile the girl squatted beside her father, weaving a basket out of pandanus fiber, or simply sat idle with her head faintly inclined to his. She never used the kitchen. Instead she built a cooking fire just inside the door. Neither she nor her father questioned the circular hole it burnt in the rug, but pulled their seed-cakes from its embers and sometimes offered Rayner a sweet fruit paste which they blended over its flames. In their room the beds and chairs were ignored, and they never touched an electric switch. Every dusk they unrolled their soiled quilt over the floor and slept back to back with their hair flared out around headrests improvised from the garden stones.

  Yet they slept fitfully. Through the villa”s papery walls Rayner heard their sudden words and cries. It was as if the stress which they denied by day was experienced in their dreams. Sometimes he felt it was in dreams that their real lives were lived, and that in daytime they merely waited.

  The old man grew visibly robuster in these first few days, and even the girl began woodenly to acknowledge her surroundings. Whenever Rayner saw her she smiled at him, but the smile was superposed on her face: she had copied it from her father. It flashed on and off. And when their eyes met, her gaze no longer dropped, but held Rayner”s in a blank, unfathomable stare: just a pair of eyes, looking.

  Rayner felt a premature sadness for her, because she might soon be alone, but his pity was impaired by her enigma, by the apparent absence of any person in her, and besides, she was not a girl any longer but a young woman. She had the long, veined feet and hands of her people, already refined, and her breasts pushed against the white dress. She knew no language but her own, yet Zoë befriended her with chatter—”She must understand something”—and brought her different fruits and cakes, which were sometimes eaten and sometimes set aside.

  Only the presence of the cat altered her expression. Then the knot of native unease flickered between her eyes, and when Zoë held the creature out to her she darted back in dismay. She did not understand what the cat was for. As Zoë fondled it, smoothing the paws against her own neck, the girl watched in wonderment, as if the cat and the white woman had a secret pact together.

  On the second day Zoë heard a scream from her bedroom. She looked in and saw the girl sitting in front of the dressing table with her hands lifted to her head. She had discovered herself in the mirror. Until today she had used only a square of tin in which to glimpse her face, but now she was confronted by the brilliant, life-size woman who lived in reflection. She stared at her, awestruck. She steered her head from side to side, and pattered her fingertips over her cheeks. At last she realized that the woman would not suddenly do something on her own. Then, slowly, she unbuttoned the top of the torn dress, slipped it down from her shoulders and gazed at her reflected breasts. She laughed.

  Now that in the town”s eyes the two natives had drifted from Rayner”s protection and back into the wilderness, he felt that people”s stares were no longer on him (but perhaps they never had been). Yet the natives” presence in the house confirmed how little he understood them. They were not only different from the town”s conception of its enemy, and from the axe-men of his own fear, but they were different from one another. The old man”s years of stock breeding had touched him with the white man”s world. But the girl was a repository of her people”s mystery. She existed free of any values he knew.

  These days the town”s anger and helplessness were palpable in the humid streets. Men shouldered their way to work as if the community”s survival depended on it. Police and passing soldiers were routinely harangued. And the mood infected both the vigorous and the passive, depending on their fear.

  From a long way away, as he returned from his rounds, Rayner glimpsed the elegant head of Felicie approaching along the mall. He expected her to flutter a hand at him and pass on, but instead her fists landed on his chest in a childish tattoo, and she drove him into a shop entrance. How could he have done that to Ivar, she demanded? Didn”t he owe loyalty? Or else what was the point of old friends? With the town in the state it was, why couldn”t he cooperate? He must take pleasure in sabotage, she concluded. He must want them all to go under. Otherwise, why?

  Rayner said, “The man had been murdered.”

  “Ivar said he hadn”t,” Felicie panted. “And Ivar should know. Don”t you trust him?” “Not always.”

  Her fists resumed their infantile thudding. “You”re his oldest friend!”

  Rayner took her wrists and held her irritably away. “It doesn”t matter if I signed that death notice or not. The army would falsify it anyway.”

  “Then why didn”t you do it?” Her head shook on its neck like a flower. “You”re just stubborn.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Why?”

  He pointed whimsically to his maimed foot. “Because I can”t run away.”

  But Felicie refused to smile. She half screamed, “Don”t expect any loyalty from him!”

  “I don”t.” But Rayner wondered if Ivar were planning some reprisal.

  “Because he has every right to grind you into the earth!”

  “He hasn”t any right to do anything. He just asked me to lie about a man”s death.”

  Felicie was close to tears. Her bouffant hair sagged like sodden corn. “It”s all right for you. You get paid by the state. But we”re trying to run a business in this place, and everything was fine until now, just fine … until …”—her springing tears made her furious—”until these savages had to start this killing…. And you condone it. If this goes on the club will shut down. And what would happen to your precious Zoë then?”

  But Felicie wasn”t looking into Zoë”s future, Rayner knew: she was looking into her own, and she saw nothing. He said curtly, “Zoë”s clever enough to get a job anywhere. She might start a new career.” Yet he could not imagine Zoë without her dancing. Her natural expression would be lost. So she was in the power of these people. “Are things really so bad?”

  Felicie crumpled. “It”s empty half the evening, Zoë must have told you. People come in early and leave their guns against the walls like it was an armory, and go away by nine.” She shuddered. “The farmers only make it worse. They don”t even buy drinks, they just sit.”

  She looked so abject, Rayner said, “It will come right again.” He glanced at the suffocating sky. “With the October rains.”

  But as he went home, their conversation lingered uncomfortably with him.
He wandered in the garden, breathing the faint, perpetual stench of bush fires, and at last came and sat beside the two natives. They were leaning forward a little, side by side, with their heartbreaking look of perplexity, saying nothing. They had perhaps been sitting like that all afternoon. The girl shot Rayner her confusing smile, then went indoors. The old man said, “Nothing changed, eh?”

  “You”ll be well enough to go before anything changes.”

  “I feel better than a long time now.”

  They sat silent for a minute in the stifling shade of the trees. Then Rayner asked, “The people here say the armed bands upriver are fifty or sixty strong now. You think that”s true? What are they planning?”

  “Maybe is true. Those fellows join together if they get scared. But those aren”t my people and I don”t know. That”s hard territory up there, water holes all empty in a bad year. That country dry out people in the head, and then they go killing.”

  “Could they attack the town?”

  “Those big groups not for fighting, I reckon. There”s too many older fellows with them. Those bands just running scared. It”s the lone ones do the killing.” He lifted his finger. “Some of those blokes upriver gone bad singly, maybe, but they only kill a few folks.”

  “They”ve killed eleven.”

  The old man considered this in silence. His screwed-up eyes and forehead had retracted into a charred immobility. All his life seemed concentrated in the fleshy mouth, which moved in its beard like an independent oracle. “Eleven not so many. Whitefellers”ll come back and get those farms again.”

  “The farms will be the same,” Rayner said. “But you can”t bring the dead people back.”

  “People change,” the old man said. “In twenty, forty years people all dead anyway, and lying in separate graves. Me too.” He laughed. “My life done now.”

  Rayner revolted against his words, but could find nothing to say. As he stared into the native”s cinder-colored face, this acceptance of death no longer seemed the superstition which the whites claimed, but the knowledge of a people coeval with all this violent, ancient land—a people to whom death was only the flow of time and of the clan. That, perhaps, accounted for their stasis, their sometime indifference to killing. It made Rayner feel naïve. He could not share in it. He could only share the townspeople”s outrage.

  He asked the native, “Have you killed a man?”

  “I never had no reason.” The old face remained impassive. “But some blokes I used to know, in the old days, they killed two, three fellers before dying.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, that was the custom, you know. He killed one of you, and you killed him. Fellers in those days didn”t kill for land or stock. They killed for revenge, eh, for dead men. But I don”t hold with that. Those ways gone.”

  In the doorway behind them the girl appeared with a fresh-made cake in either hand. She darted forward to offer them, then sat down on the far side of her father and stared at the grass.

  Rayner asked, “Is she happy?” But as he looked at her, the concept of happiness seemed irrelevant.

  The old man said, “She”ll be happy when we find our people. We been too long single.”

  “You could leave in two or three days.”

  The man said something to the girl and she answered back not in the shy tones which Rayner always expected, but in her harsh gabble.

  The native laughed. “She says you”re a good man. You make her old father well again.”

  “Remind her she must keep you well,” Rayner said. “Tell you to take tablets.” He looked at her enigmatic profile. “She”s a fine girl.”

  The old man said, “You like her?”

  “You”re lucky to have her.”

  The native laughed again, comfortably, as if at something warm inside him.

  Rayner asked, “How far is it back to your people?”

  “I not sure.” His chest heaved under its shirt. “Maybe ten days, maybe fifteen. Our people too much scattered, they go out and live one there, one here, the young blokes.” He inscribed a circle in the dust in front of him. “But the old fellers come back and die in their birth country.”

  Rayner envied the man”s freedom. In this nation, only the nomads moved about at will. If Rayner tried to return to his birthplace, he would meet a bureaucratic wall; but this man had only to walk. Rayner looked at the wavering circle which the native had drawn in the earth. It seemed a very natural journey. He asked, “Where do your people go after they die?”

  The old man answered at once, “Some say you go into the ground, that you just rot there, and your life done. But others say you climb up the sky, back out of time.” He spoke as if both prospects were equal to him. “I heard your white missionaries say that too, that some fellers sit underneath in the soil, other fellers sit above in the sky. It”s the same with us.” He leaned forward and smoothed away the circle in the dust with the palm of one hand. The girl watched him, as if this were in some way important. “But I reckon maybe there”s no way back into the sky, that since the tree got cut we stay down here.”

  Rayner remembered the rock paintings, in which a symbolic tree had separated the fluid figures from the static ones. But the photographs which he had taken of them had turned out wan. The camera seemed to have registered the painted scarp just as he first had: an empty wall of rock. But when he showed the photographs to the native, the man”s finger wavered across their surfaces in amazement and recognition. “This the same place all right.”

  In fascination Rayner tried again to pin down its story. Was this some inner landscape? Were the graceful figures the natives” ideal of themselves?

  But no, said the old man. “This just our life as it is, as it was.”

  So their beauty was only an artist”s convention, Rayner realized, mixed with the passage of time. “And the tree?” He could barely discern it in the photograph; even on the living scarp, he remembered, it had been little more than a meander of faded white. “The tree led into the sky?”

  “That was in the old days,” the old man said. “The sky was lower then.”

  Dimly Rayner could discern the white divide in the photograph—and on its far side the region where the fluid figures turned plump and stationary. The old man”s head sank onto his chest in a pillow of beard. “Those ones belong before time.” He was growing tired, or perhaps reluctant. “When the tree cut down, then time began.”

  So the felling of the tree was the event which exiled earth from heaven: the start of mortality. Rayner asked, “Might it grow again?”

  “Some fellers think maybe,” the native said. “And you can still see that place out there, the navel of the earth.” His hand lifted in the direction of the wilderness. “Maybe one day the tree grow back.”

  Rayner remembered the blighted stump which the old man had drawn him in the dust when they first met. “How?”

  But the man”s head returned to nestle on his chest. He did not answer. Rayner had asked too many questions, he realized. Unwittingly he may even have probed the man about his own survival beyond death. The tree, after all, had been the avenue to paradise. Yet the man seemed to regard the future with a dispassionate familiarity. Perhaps he was one of those who believed that the dead simply pass into the earth.

  When Zoë met Rayner at the door next evening, she was holding a suitcase, and the cat was mewling round her ankles. She said, “I”m going to the flat to sleep. I”m washed out.”

  “Aren”t you dancing?”

  “I told them I can”t tonight. The place is half empty anyhow.”

  He heard alarm in his voice. “What”s wrong?”

  Her recurring need to be alone had always taken other forms than this; he would sense it in the self-contained way in which she moved about the house, with averted head. But her turning away tonight was tinged by petulance and accusation. In the oppressive heat, tiny bulbs of sweat glistened along her hairline, and she kept touching her knuckles against her eyes.

  “I”m ju
st tired,” she said. “I”ve got period pains.”

  He offered to drive her to her flat, but knew she would refuse. Then she said, “I wish you hadn”t been so superior with Felicie.”

  He repeated irritably, “Superior?”

  “She”s distraught about the club. It”s becoming a desert, and she said you looked pleased.”

  “I wasn”t pleased.”

  “You told her I could always do another job.” She stooped down and gathered up the cat. “But I don”t want any other job.”

  Then Rayner realized what had angered her: he had belittled her vocation. And as she walked away down the road, with the cat glaring over her shoulder, she was flaunting her independence because she felt he had discounted it. He wondered, too, if the presence of the natives was starting to oppress her. Not that they imposed themselves—they were eerily quiet—but both Zoë and he had felt recently that the house was being watched.

  They squatted outside the back door, as usual, in the sultry shadows. But the girl had changed. She sat very upright and still, with her hands spread in her lap. Across her forehead dangled a string of little green stones, and two circles of corkwood dye opened up her eyes into a black stare. When she shot her meaningless smile at him, the effect was of a portrait”s canvas splitting. It brought a shock of emptiness.

  Rayner sat beside the old man and took his blood pressure, which had been stable for a week now. “In two days you”ll be able to go.” But as he scrutinized the encircling trees, his relief was followed by a nagging disquiet. Anybody scaling the fence and parting the foliage might see the natives here. He said, “You haven”t noticed anybody watching?”

  “My eyes not so good now.” The old man turned to the girl. “But her eyes young, and she seen nothing.” He continued looking at her, while her painted gaze stayed fixed on her lap.

  Rayner supposed he should remark on her, but her impact was unsettling. He said formally, “She”s looking pretty.”

  The girl glanced at him, as though she understood. Then she and her father conversed together, he in a growling, sibilant flow, she in her abrupt jabber. They might have been speaking separate languages. The old man tapped Rayner”s forearm; it was the first time he had voluntarily touched him. “She says she”s glad you like her.”