Turning Back the Sun

by Colin Thubron

  But the episode left him uneasy. He could no longer quite predict himself. Soon afterwards, coming upon some photographic portraits in his desk, he found himself hunting them for an explanation. But his parents stared back at him out of another age. The cut of his father”s hair and lawyer”s dress looked austerely archaic; and his mother”s face was cradled in the side curls fashionable twenty years ago. And her dress—did they still dress like that in the capital?

  Yet he thought of his parents” traits as alternating in him. Even their faces. He recognized his father”s features in his own harsh cheeks and hectoring eyes. They shared the same angry, overhung brows. But when he looked in the mirror he saw, between his father”s nose and firm chin, his mother”s mouth smiling. And in calmer moods, as if it superposed itself at moments of his father”s inattention, he would sense the whole stamp of his expression overcast by hers.

  There were times when he could not disentangle in himself his father”s solitude and ferocious spirit of enquiry from his mother”s sentimental longings and compassion. Often now he was flooded by an incontinent sympathy for people as he talked with them—for a patient, a girlfriend, or just an acquaintance—and after they had left him he would clean forget them. He saw himself oscillating between pity and isolated indifference. He expended more energy on the town than almost anyone he knew: he had even started an advisory service to the more distant cattle stations, and his voice over the shaky radiotelegraph must have saved women in childbirth from fatal septicemia. Yet for all his apparent commitment, his energy, a profound inner betrayal separated him off.

  He wanted to return to the capital.

  Nowadays the car crash which had killed his mother and maimed his own foot, together with his exile from the capital—all within three months—struck him as a severance from any understanding of himself. He had never afterwards seen himself a continuous person. His first nineteen years seemed to have been lived dreaming. Sometimes he fancied that his parents had died with the secret of him, and that if only he could return to the capital he might recover it.

  CHAPTER

  3

  People say the savages have this idol out in the desert, where there”s a freshwater spring. They pretend it talks to them.”

  Rayner said, “We pretend God talks to us.”

  “I think you do.” Ivar looked at him in a way which merged scorn with affection so indissolubly that Rayner could not be annoyed. He remembered this derisive fondness from their schooldays in the capital: Ivar, stocky in his green neckscarf and jumper, saying, “Come on, Rayner. Are you one of my gang or not?”

  They sat in a cave of dimmed light and music. It was rather a ritzy nightclub for a town like this, Rayner thought. It sported a cabaret with striptease, and four or five hostesses of various appeal. The waitresses, including a sad, sexless transvestite, glided between the tables in high-collared jackets and fishnet tights. Rayner wondered who came here. They seemed mostly to be young businessmen and a few army officers like Ivar.

  Rayner said vaguely, “I”ve usually met women without all this paraphernalia.” The place reeked of something new to him (but anything new in this town was a relief): an ambience of the sin market, of sexual peril. It was fleetingly provocative.

  Ivar said, “They”re a decent lot of girls here. And you don”t pay them, remember, you give them presents.”

  Rayner laughed uneasily. “You do, I go home.”

  From time to time Ivar and he indulged the uncritical friendship of old schoolmates. Yet they also held off from one another. They were too deeply unlike. Ivar”s features smoothed into one another like cement. He seemed to spread calm about him. His low-lidded eyes held an intelligence unconfused by passion or (Rayner suspected) much conscience. It was the face of a man inspecting an orderly room; whereas Rayner”s glared into chaos. Rayner seemed to conduct a running quarrel with the world in which Ivar was at home. They slightly tantalized one another.

  But Ivar was also a source of information. He was second-in-command of the garrison here: a callow-looking company of the Fourth Field Army in what the military still called a “key frontier town.” And Rayner could not resist leaning forward under the din of the music and saying, “Did they find out anything about the murders?”

  Ivar said, “That was a police job.”

  “But you”ve increased your patrols, haven”t you? Or is all that driving about in jeeps just to reassure us?”

  Ivar looked at him in a way which Rayner remembered, with the watching smile of someone who uses intimacies like a weapon. Even in their schooldays, Ivar had been the wielder of secret knowledge. Now he said, “There”s been another killing. Just this morning. An old man in one of those smallholdings. Had a spear in the side. They just took his cattle food and wireless. And that was just four kilometers from here.”

  Rayner said, “It must be the failed rains. Perhaps they”re getting desperate.”

  Ivar shook his head. “I think they enjoy killing. They kill for almost nothing.” He said in the same level, comfortable tone, “If we adopted their code, they”d be rounded up tomorrow and eliminated.” “You talk as if you want to.”

  “It would be more rational.” Ivar spoke with neither rancor nor regret. “Because they can”t adapt. If a species fails to adapt, it dies.”

  Rayner thought: no, they can”t adapt. That is what”s fascinating about them. He remembered their night fires along the river, the unintelligible words of their chanting. “I don”t know anything about them,” he said.

  “The evidence is that war is a religion with them. Their idol is a kind of war god.”

  “How did you hear that?”

  “The older settlers had it from missionaries. That”s why the missionaries never made any headway, they say. The savages had their own god already. They never understood Christianity. They got confused by the Trinity.”

  Rayner said harshly, “So do I.”

  Ivar smiled into his brandy. The music almost dinned out the words. “You always were a pighead. I remember that.”

  “Do you?” Rayner did not remember it.

  “You always got in a hell of a passion about things, then walked away into your own world and forgot. Do you remember the time we planned …”

  Occasionally, as now, something Ivar said shocked Rayner into memory, and he”d think: so I can”t have changed much after all. He asked caustically, “Where”s this idol meant to be, then? Out in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Not exactly.” Ivar became suddenly discreet. Rayner had the impression that he”d put on his uniform. “It”s on our maps.”

  Even as a boy, Ivar had been impressive, Rayner remembered. He”d been expert at the disclosure or withholding of information. Information, even then, was power. He”d always known which teachers to manipulate, how to get cheap cigarettes, the best crib-sheets.

  “So you”re preparing to round them up.”

  “You can”t usually find them. If you hunt them, they just dissolve …”

  But a pair of woman”s arms had arrived round Ivar”s neck. She was tall, with cornflower eyes and a small head misted in maize-colored hair. She was the reason Ivar had come. Her eyes wandered over Rayner. “I”m Felicie,” she said. “My father owns this place.” He felt her assessing him: money, age, sexuality … but she did so with a distrait candor, and he realized he was smiling at her. “This is Zoë,” she said. “I sing. She”s a dancer.”

  She settled by Ivar on his right, while Zoë—a silent, fiercely made-up girl—sat by Rayner but looked in the other direction. They were not the prostitutes Rayner had expected. He was unsure what they were. They were not even typical artistes. Felicie talked in a rapid, lost voice with her arms circled round Ivar. Was it true what she”d heard about the savages, she asked? Might they attack the town? Perhaps by night …

  Ivar drank his brandy between her locked arms. Nothing was true, he said.

  She released him petulantly. “God, I hate this town. And now we”re going to be murder
ed in it.”

  “You can be murdered anywhere.”

  “But it gets more violent every year. And it”s so boring. Give me the capital any day. God, I love the capital!” But she spoke as if it didn”t matter. Hating this or loving that was a pastime. She looked vaguely, perpetually out of focus, Rayner thought. She reached over and shook Zoë”s arm. “Did you see the latest? Scoop-back gowns are back in fashion. In the capital …”

  But Zoë did not answer, and Felicie focused suddenly on Rayner. “I haven”t seen you around before. Are you from the capital?”

  “Years ago,” Rayner said. He suppressed the ruefulness in his voice. “Fifteen years.” But he did not want to discuss it with her.

  Felicie murmured, “Fifteen years.” She stroked Ivar”s cheek, while he kissed her lips, so that Rayner turned to Zoë and asked woodenly, “What kind of dancing do you do?”

  She looked at him for the first time. Compared with Felicie, she seemed perfectly, violently concentrated: a too-immaculate face, browned and powdered and lit by glittering pale-blue eyes, which repelled enquiry. Her hair was seized back like a ballerina”s and knotted in a shining scallop behind. “The dancing”s a mixture,” she said. “Jazz, flamenco, ballet …”

  He noticed how her fingers wrenched at one another. He had thought her bored or preoccupied, but instead she was nervous. She added with a trace of defiance, “I compose my own dances.”

  Rayner guessed her dances would be conventional, whereas Felicie, who under her manicured pallor seemed to be screaming, would sing in a way he could not predict.

  She stood up shakily and took Zoë”s hand. “We”re performing in a minute,” she said. Odd, Rayner thought, how Felicie seemed to exist underwater, her hair adrift and her movements all strengthless. She kissed Ivar”s neck and smiled at Rayner. She had the kind of loose, mobile mouth which he found attractive.

  The curtains parted before a small stage with a backdrop of mirrors and hanging strips of silver. The tables were starting to fill up with youths who had come in from late-night bars or from one of the licensed brothels. Shouts of, “Where”s the strippers?” went up, and “Get on with it!”

  But the revue had been programmed to titillate. The first to take the stage was a middle-aged acrobat who suspended himself lugubriously between aluminum poles. Then came a skinny contortionist, who twined around herself so effortlessly that Rayner stopped being surprised at anything she did. Yet this furtive venue—the plush, converted cellar with its blue spotlights and recorded cymbals and drums—lent to these acts a hint of the forbidden. If they”d been performed in one of the town squares, he thought, they would have gone almost ignored. But here, in the theater of secrecy, in the dramatized dark, people paid to watch, and were waiting. Their heads clustered black along the tables nearest the stage. Their camaraderie had dwindled to crude expectation.

  Ivar”s eyes flickered between bar and stage and floor. He was totting up costs and income, and eventually said, “Felicie”s father must make a packet out of this rubbish.”

  “Is she your girlfriend now?” Rayner had watched Ivar change girlfriends unscathed. Of all the enigmas in Ivar, this was the deepest and most enviable to him.

  “Yes. But I”m not interested in her money. She”s just a nice girl. A bit simple. Her people came from the capital twenty years ago, and she”s got this fantasy about going back.”

  “I don”t blame her,” Rayner said. “What”s there for her here?” He noticed Ivar flinch with annoyance. “Unless you”re serious about her.”

  Ivar said, “There”s no point in her dreaming of going back when she can”t. This town is basically as good as anywhere else.” He spoke in the reasonable tones which at once impressed and maddened Rayner—Ivar so reeked of comfort and self-control. “There”s nothing in the capital that you can”t buy here. I”ve been away twelve years now and I don”t miss a thing. Not a thing.”

  Rayner was amazed. “Christ, Ivar, don”t you remember anything? Do you really not remember? You may be able to buy the same things—I can”t recall much of that—but the whole spirit of the capital is different. It”s another climate, different history, different—You must remember the girls, at least. Just take our gang. Jarmila, Miriam, Adelina …”

  “There are plenty of girls here.”

  “But they don”t think the same way.” Rayner heard his own cruelty, he couldn”t help it. “They”ve no—no quality. And how could they have? Things are tough here. It”s not only the way people look. This is a practical place. Possessions, entertainment. There”s nothing more. Does anybody talk about anything else here?” His words grew loud against the music. “God, Ivar you must remember. The capital just breeds another kind of person. Perhaps it”s because the sea”s there, while we”ve only got desert …”

  But a slow frown had gathered on Ivar”s forehead. He just said, “I think it”s much the same everywhere. And even if it isn”t, you have to adjust.” He touched Rayner”s arm with the strange, sudden warmth which always surprised Rayner: a concession to their schooldays, to the shared past, a leftover (Rayner felt, ironically) from the lost capital. “If you don”t adjust, you”re history.”

  Rayner thought: he must be protecting himself, he must remember as well as I do.

  Rayner remembered them in the capital walking through a park by the ever-present sea. Over the years this image had often recurred to him, yet it recorded a moment of so little import that he wondered why it was by this that he so often remembered the city. Perhaps the picture had implanted itself simply because it was typical. But there they were, Ivar and he, with Miriam and Jarmila between them, wandering through the autumn leaves of giant sycamores, while beside them ran the wrought-iron railings ubiquitous in the city: heavy, grand and thickened by a hundred repaintings; and beyond them rose their own tall, terraced houses. In this image all their surroundings were much older than they were, and he thought of this ancientness—a benign security stretching back almost forever—as peculiar to the capital.

  Suddenly the curtains parted and Felicie appeared, touching a microphone to her lips like a baby”s dummy. A see-through chiffon dress tinged her white body in watery blue. Her bare feet poked out waifishly beneath it, and her head was coddled in a silver cap flecked with small wings, like an effete Valkyrie.

  Then she sang, and for the first and last time that evening Rayner felt like a voyeur. Every other artiste had shaped a real performance, however inept, but under Felicie”s foolish costume and ingénue masquerade was only her naked self, and this she gave in the pathetic confidence that it must have value.

  Sometimes at night I dream

  I”m in your arms again

  Sometimes at night return

  To that lost room

  Rayner felt he was staring into a vacuum: just borrowed yearnings and self-pity. Her voice whimpered and squeaked like a mouse. If the proprietor had not been her father, he thought, she wouldn”t have passed an audition. He found himself deeply, inexplicably pained by it, as if he were somehow himself the victim of her humiliation. And he dared not even look at Ivar.

  If you remember me

  I”ll journey home …

  Yet when the curtains closed on her, there was desultory clapping. The bleary music continued. The audience went on knocking back its eau-de-vie. Nobody seemed to have noticed anything, or to have shared his vicarious pain. Ivar just smiled at him suavely and said, “You won”t find many women of thirty looking like that.”

  So Ivar had not listened to her, Rayner thought—and who could blame him? He”d just watched her body. “Yes,” Rayner said, “she”s … pretty”—and the word extinguished her.

  “You could make a decent life here with the right girl,” Ivar said. “Men of our age should think of settling down. Not much more of this …” He gestured at the stage, where the first of the strippers was starting on her ritual of petty disclosures and delays.

  Ivar passed laconic judgement on them. “Bottom”s too slack … that one won
”t last … good breasts … there”s ugly muscle tone …”—and about one, a coffee-skinned siren with the betraying loose limbs and knotted brows of another people: “Reckon she”s got savage blood.”

  To Rayner each turn seemed more vapid than the last. The girls entered dressed as geishas, cats, houris, schoolmistresses, chatelaines. As they peeled off their veils and wimples and smocks, he felt as clinical towards them as to the women he examined each morning for pregnancy or breast cancer. “Do they do it for money?”

  “No,” Ivar said. “They get paid a pittance.”

  So their mystery deepened.

  From time to time their acts were broken by interludes of conjuring or song, and in one of these Zoë appeared. She was accompanied by violent music. In its mask of powder and eye shadow, she had re-created her face not for human intimacy but for theatrical display. He saw this now. It projected her with schematic vividness. The stringent ballerina”s hairdo withdrew all softening from her battle plan of upcurved mouth and highlit cheekbones. She was fiercely attractive.

  She released herself headlong into the music. Her dancing was as she”d said, an amalgam of her own: a tumult of twisting, leaping and mime, out of which—as if from early training—erupted balletic pirouettes and arabesques. She seemed to dance out of some defiant core in her, without thought of her audience. The music throbbed and swung. Every movement shouted: this is me! Even her figure, encased in a vulgar iridescent leotard, came as a surprise. Her torso with its long, delicate arms and soft-looking breasts, descended to full hips and strong dancer”s legs. She seemed less sexual than violently, demonically physical.

  Rayner sensed the audience go still: confronted by the unexpected. In the screen of mirrors behind the stage they were all reflected as a diffused whiteness, like dead fish floating in the dark, while the fierce, small figure in the leotard, cut low behind down a shimmering brown back, flung herself angrily at their indifference.