Turning Back the Sun

by Colin Thubron

  They sat in a row before it. Ivar had secured its leg with a strand of string. It froze, panting. Gerhard picked up a small rock and placed it ceremonially in front of him. “It deserves to die.”

  But Leon had turned white. He was staring at it in fascinated recoil. “I say we let it go.”

  “You would.” Ivar turned to Rayner. Even aged nine, he had somehow seized the initiative and made himself chief judge. “Gerhard votes for death, Leon votes against. What do you say?”

  Rayner demanded, “What”s it done wrong?”

  Gerhard thought. “It eats flies.”

  Rayner rebelled. He sometimes hated Gerhard. “That”s just its nature.”

  There was silence. Then Ivar nodded, perhaps reluctantly, but repeated, “That”s just its nature. You can”t count that.”

  “Then you can”t count anything!” Gerhard said.

  “You can,” Rayner answered. “It”s got to be a nasty kind of lizard, say, or a nasty bloke—like you!” They scrambled together, fists flailing. Rayner and Gerhard were always fighting.

  But Ivar shouted, “Stop! The trial continues!”

  The tousled line of judges reassembled. It was astonishing what power Ivar already had, and an uncanny composure. He seemed to know everything. He appealed to Gerhard, “What else is wrong with this lizard?”

  But Gerhard had no imagination. He glared dourly between Rayner, Leon and the ghekko, and ground his rock impotently into the soil.

  At last Ivar said, “Rayner and Leon vote against, so that”s two against one.” He untied the ghekko”s leg. Its white cheeks pulsed, but it stayed where it was. “I declare this lizard okay.”

  Leon cried, “We win!” But he was in the grip of a secret excitement. He couldn”t take his eyes from the lizard. Rayner tried to poke it into life, but it remained motionless, like a carving fallen from the balustrade. Only its gills went on pulsing, and once it opened a weak, pink mouth.

  At last they grew bored. Gerhard marched home, singing derisively, and Ivar and Rayner scrambled onto the terrace, arguing. Then they sat quiet in the sun, feeling exhausted. Irritably Rayner wondered how Ivar always managed to turn himself into the leader, but he could uncover no method. He doodled with his toes in the dust.

  But after a while, just beyond where they sat, they heard a dry, violent pounding. They stared at one another, crept to the balustrade and peered over. Then they saw something which neither of them ever spoke of again: it was too private, too unaccountable. Beneath them, with cold, frenzied blows of the rock, Leon was pulping the lizard to death.

  During his last few days, Rayner took to rambling the streets and parks. He was reminded of how beautiful the city was. Unsmirched by industry, the façades of all its public buildings shone in a lustrous stone. They resembled, he thought, a stately theater set. He peered inside the Opera House, which was showing L” Africaine, and watched the guards outside the presidential palace, marching back and forth in their white and gold uniforms. He took coffee under the hanging flower baskets of the shopping arcade. He even spent time identifying the statues in the squares: men in frock coats, mostly, with scrolls and upraised fingers, telling the world things. Sometimes the whole city seemed very innocent.

  Occasionally, a little way in front of him, he imagined he recognized the rangy stride of Adelina or the froth of Miriam”s curls. But when he drew alongside, the expression which met his would be blank. In fact he saw nobody he knew. And people seemed to move in a languid self-absorption. Their eyes might meet his, but they rarely focused, and he came to associate this dreamy stare with the city: a gaze without penetration, like the becalmed vision of a cat. Whole shops and restaurants and streets were filled with it. It turned them faintly unreal. Even the young women, looking back at him, would only glance away or smile after two or three seconds. A few of them were beautiful. But most looked merely pretty, like mezzotints. He could not imagine them losing their tempers or making love. They only made him ache for Zoë: her exuberance and irreverence and unpredictable passions.

  Once he saw a cat like hers squeezing through a restaurant doorway and felt suddenly, joltingly sick. He half expected her to follow it out and gather it in her arms.

  He wondered where the savages had gone, who years ago had been drafted in as domestic labor, but there was scarcely a sign of them. They had not intermarried, and the few he saw were “white men”s natives,” tamed and neat in their suits and frocks. Only once, as if she had stepped out of the wilderness, a wild-looking woman and her young child came striding past him down the central boulevard, inexplicable among the trams and parasols.

  Whenever Rayner turned the corner into his parents” street and glimpsed between the ranks of balconies the whitewashed church, he received a momentary sensation that he shouldn”t be there, that the whole street belonged to the dead. He had not attended mass for fifteen years, and had lost his faith before that: yet unconsciously he had located belief in this sanctuary near his childhood home, where God perhaps survived inside the comfortable body of the community.

  He stepped into the nave. Two or three elderly women were sitting among pews in the pleated chiffon collars which they wore for confession. Nothing had changed. The plaster Virgin still looked at heaven while the tapers died at her feet, and the saints performed their miracles in the stained glass. He went softly into the chancel. He remembered each memorial plaque. Higher up, where as a boy he had offered Anna”s crystal to the crucified Christ, the embroidered gold altar cloth was dedicated to the memory of his father.

  Then he felt a heart-shaking guilt, as if his apostasy was branded on him. He was standing in a foreign temple. It mattered now that he could not repeat the Creed or drink the wine, and he remembered amazed how for three years he had attended mass in half-belief, or none. Now he was too exacting even to look at the altar”s gold Christ. His God had not outlived him in the city, had not been located in space at all, but in time, where He had been lost.

  CHAPTER

  23

  Doctor Morena had a creaseless moon-face which looked permanently anointed with skin cream. He apologized for the howl of babies in the surgery—which was mild compared to baby clinic day in Rayner”s practice—and settled pleasantly behind his desk. He had known Birgit Sorensen for years, he said—a truly original woman, “one of the old school”—and had read Rayner”s articles on psoriasis with respect. If Rayner should decide to settle in the capital, then … conditions, he implied, were more benign than those in the town. Heatstroke and septicemia were rare, and diseases due to stress were less common than infectious and hereditary ones. But even TB and diphtheria were on the wane; and there were, of course, no industrial accidents, and little alcoholism or venereal disease. The surgical and obstetric wings of the local hospital coped with any problems beyond general expertise.

  Smiling back at the beneficent, faintly smug face in the well-appointed clinic, Rayner felt perverse to be hankering after the rumpus of his own. Medically, he knew, it was not the way things should be, but his tough, diversified practice—the chaotic improvising, the follow-up of his patients through the hand-to-mouth hospitals, the hazards of his radiotelegraph service—had become his second nature and stimulus. Out there he was at once more tested, more needed and more self-governing than here. He recognized that he had been tightened to a certain pitch like a violin string, and could not now be undone. A little astonished at himself, he thanked Dr. Morena for his offer, but realized that he would decline. He was bewildered at the finality of this, and by his lack of much regret.

  But he wanted to go home.

  In the sky, as he started back to his aunt, a whispering flock of cranes, heading south, betrayed the deepening autumn. He got off the tram beyond the State Assembly, and entered the skein of familiar streets. His foot was starting to throb, but he was nearly back, and did not care. For the first time, as he rounded the corner into his parents” road, he had the sensation that it existed in its simple essence of iron and stone, and that i
n the last few hours it had been laid obscurely to rest.

  The nurse opened the door to him. She said, “A Mrs. Miriam Eliade called to see you. She said she”d be back in an hour.”

  So she was coming. He sat down on a chair in the hall and stared into the mirror opposite. He saw a tanned, shriven face with a fierce chin and sensuous mouth. Already small lines were tearing its forehead and pinching the corners of its eyes. And his hair was receding in two shallow bays. He had hardened, he knew, and perhaps coarsened. Yet he found himself hoping sentimentally that Miriam would be unaltered, that he would be confronted by the vibrant girl he remembered. He went upstairs and changed his shirt. He laughed at himself a little as he combed his hair sideways, like a schoolboy preparing for a date.

  When the knocker sounded he sauntered downstairs, restraining his nerves, and opened the door. Then he stood frozen by surprise. He might have opened a door onto the past. It was almost shocking. She stood there in a white dress. The same dark eyes were smiling at him from her brown face. The familiar curls shifted round her shoulders. The same brimming figure radiated health.

  For a moment he just stared at her. “You must be immortal!” Then he burst into laughter and his hands lifted to his own face. “My God, I look bad.”

  She kissed him. “It doesn”t matter for men!” But he could feel her gaze raking over him, trying to disinter the nineteen-year-old boy from the thirty-four-year-old man.

  His aunt was sleeping, so they sat in the room full of mirrors and faded sun. Her unchangedness mesmerized him. Her skin had kept the glow and clarity of a girl”s. The brown vigor of her body seemed to be pouring health into it even as she sat there. From the dive-boat he had carried away an image of this summer skin—a lemony, translucent tissue above pretty blue veins—and had imagined he”d exaggerated it. But here it was, amber against her white dress, a hand”s touch from him. He grinned bemusedly at her. Whenever she smiled at him and her eyes crinkled in their short, black lashes, time concertinaed helplessly and they were kissing in the city park again.

  But what had happened to her, he demanded, and why hadn”t she written?

  Well, why hadn”t he written? He knew she was a hopeless letter writer. And oh, what had happened to her? Everything. She”d got married, had a child, been divorced.

  “I was a perfect idiot to marry him! Everybody told me so. But you know me!” Her laughter bubbled up unbidden, and the old vivacity lit her face. “He was a horse-breeder from the Djaban region. Can you imagine it? Me sitting out there! Ennui! We had bags of money, of course, but nowhere to go and nothing to do. I don”t want to see another horse as long as I live. And I still can”t tell a palomino from an Arab. In the end I just couldn”t stand it.” “Didn”t that hurt?”

  “I didn”t let it! Anyway, it was a good experience. I don”t think you should regret any experience. It”s hopeless looking back, isn”t it?” She touched her heart. “I maintain things like that don”t just happen. Nothing”s wasted! Do you think?”

  “God knows why things happen.” In the alcove where they sat facing one another, he could see her head and his multiplied in the mirrors behind each of them, on and on through the distilled sunlight in the tarnished glass. Every time she moved a fraction, the shimmer of her curls thronged into infinity, while his craggy face swarmed in between, until they dwindled and sickened into a greenish distance caused by his aunt”s never cleaning her mirrors.

  He said, “What happened then?”

  “I came back and lived here,” she said. “Where else can one go? Now I look after my daughter, who”s a monster. Adorable, but a monster. If only she sat still occasionally like my ex-husband, that brute scarcely moved! But she takes after me.” Her body wriggled in its low-cut dress.

  “What about our old friends?”

  “Oh I never really got on with Jarmila, she”s too selfish. But I see Leon sometimes.” A small frown crossed her face. “He”s a dear, but so introspective …” Her eyes glittered at him. “How strange to see you! All those years ago! Do you remember the picnics above the cliffs? And the diving?”

  “Of course I do. Diving was the last time I saw you, when we used each other”s regulators.”

  “Wasn”t it fun?” She shot her ebullient smile. “Do you remember the reef shark we saw? And those horrible manta rays. And oh yes, exchanging regulators. Such a peculiar feeling. It was like breathing each other”s air, wasn”t it?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Once I was doing that with Gerhard and the regulator tore itself out!” One hand fluttered from her mouth. Through the mirrors her fingers multiplied and wavered like seaweed in a drowning green current. “I haven”t gone diving for years. Have you?”

  “There”s nowhere to dive out there. You”re on the edge of desert.” The only deep water was the lake, where Zoë and he had swum and made love.

  “Oh yes, I heard about the trouble you”ve been having. What”s been done about the savages now?”

  “You can”t do much. They make their own rules. You just pray for the autumn rains. They”ve lost a lot of cattle.”

  A cloud settled over her determined brightness. He saw, of course, that even she was not quite ageless. When she drew in her chin to laugh, a tiny slackness flickered there, and a ghostly pair of crow”s-feet teased her eyes. Yet like the city she remained inexplicably the same. He recalled the pattering and precise rhythm of her talk, and the way laughter suffused it. But she was no longer memory.

  She said, “I don”t understand why the savages can”t be organized better. It”s dreadful just to leave them out there killing farmers. Can”t you round them up?”

  “If you try to round them up, they evaporate.”

  “Well, I don”t see why.” She went silent.

  He remembered this too: the combative streak which surfaced when there was something she did not understand. He said, “The savages go their own way. I once took two into my house, so I know.”

  “Took two in? Was that any fun?” She was laughing again. She seemed to have upholstered the whole hard world. “I”d have dreaded coming down in the morning and finding they”d emptied the place!”

  She still seemed to find him attractive. Her eyes sparkled over him and she laughed flirtatiously. She must gradually have leaned toward him too, because in the mirrors her teeming heads, raked by a long, dimming cross fire of sunbeams, had sunk lower than his.

  In the end she glanced at her watch and said, “I have to collect my daughter in a minute. When are we going to meet again?”

  “I”m going back tomorrow.”

  “You”re going back tomorrow! You old killjoy! Oh how sad.” She looked genuinely disappointed, a little. “I”d see you off if I could.”

  Rayner started to laugh with a trace, still, of bitterness. “I expected that before and you never came!”

  She looked at him uncomprehending.

  He said, “Fifteen years ago. When I left.”

  She clapped her cheek. “Yes, oh yes! I remember! I felt awful about that. I really did. It was somebody”s twenty-first birthday and I couldn”t come. I do remember.” She smiled weakly. “I do.” Then, “Why are you laughing?”

  She got up to say goodbye. He kissed her hand with a slightly cynical courtliness, which made her slap his head. He had always been a great tease, she said. As she embraced him, he glimpsed in the looking glass, as if down the avenues of his memory, a hundred Miriams kissing in his arms, until the uttermost rooms held only two insects saying farewell in amber. Then they disengaged, and she said, “Hope to see you before another fifteen years!”

  After she had gone he was chagrined to find tears pricking up behind his eyes. But they were not exactly for her.

  In the long-drawn evening, when the sun had dropped behind the terraces but not yet set, Rayner ambled down the unlit street toward the church. He did not go in, but wandered round the outside for a while and laid some flowers by his parents” grave. Then he sat on a bench under the carob trees, while bes
ide him all the wrought-iron verandahs and balconies became baskets of curtained light.

  Later he went indoors, expecting to eat supper with his aunt; instead he found that she had weakened and that the nurse had put her to bed. This sometimes happened, the nurse said: the old lady went up and down. But Rayner was leaving early in the morning, and he waited by her bedside. She seemed only intermittently to grasp who he was, addressing him in a different, more familiar tone, as if he were a contemporary, and once she called him by his father”s name.

  After she had fallen asleep, he went away to pack; but his suitcase was too full to close—he had bought gifts for Zoë, Leszek and several other friends—and he entered the shower room to wash off the sweat which filmed him even here. He felt suddenly tired. The water covered his back in tepid bursts. He soaped it idly. Then, as he glanced down at his body, he saw the blemish slapped on it like a leech. It dribbled blackly from one nipple almost to his groin. It had erupted without warning, overnight.

  He froze, waiting. Yet he was not struck by disgust, or fear, or even surprise. He touched it tentatively with his fingertips, in recognition. Its chocolate snake gleamed between the runnels of soap. It smeared his ribs like the dirt of reality. It seemed less like a recent eruption than an awesome birthmark. He let the water trickle over it, skirting sometimes its raised roughness, and remembered it on Zoë”s body, and on a hundred others.

  CHAPTER

  24

  There was nobody to say goodbye this time, and it was still dark when the train pulled out of the station. But Rayner”s carriage was full. He was flanked by a bewildered army conscript and a winder operator assigned to the mines. Opposite, a young financier and his wife were decrying the airy inexpertise of the capital”s bourse, but were nervous of the rumored cutthroat practices in the town. Beside them sat a gaunt schoolmistress, weeping.

  For several minutes, as the capital drifted away from them in a blaze of elusive lights, they all craned from the windows into the soft night, then one by one returned to their seats in silence, while it sank into dark.