Turning Back the Sun

by Colin Thubron

  Around a bend in the shore, bobbing under a magenta bathing-cap, came Felicie. Soon she was swimming around his rock, chatting. The sun had turned her shoulders pink.

  “Where”s Zoë?”

  “Practicing her yoga.”

  “Oh how could she?” She steadied herself beside the rock. “All that twisting about. It looks so ugly. It”s not natural.”

  “Where”s Ivar?”

  “Reading.” She squirmed onto the ledge below him. “That”s all he ever does, apart from … God it”s so boring here. What do you do all day?”

  She glanced down at her feet in the water. She craved excitement, change. But instead there was just Ivar, who would not change, and herself. It was all very well for Zoë, she said, Zoë was never bored. In fact Zoë couldn”t keep still for more than a cigarette. She must be tiring to live with. “Isn”t she?” There was open coquetry in the question.

  Rayner said, “You know her.” It was probably futile to hunt for clues to Zoë in the muddled memory of Felicie, but he heard himself add, “Has she always been like that?”

  “Oh yes, even three years ago with Ivar. Christ, she led him a dance. Served him right. She was the only woman to walk out on him.” Felicie levered herself up the rock beside Rayner. “Zoë goes mad sometimes. She takes everything too hard.” Her slim legs were burnt prawn pink. “I”m the steady one.”

  But nobody looked less steady than Felicie, Rayner thought. Her mouth, turned slackly to his, was pleading to be kissed. It was not a planned betrayal, just the moment”s need. Now that Ivar was drifting from her, she would cling to whatever floated.

  Rayner said, “Zoë and Ivar would never have got on.”

  Felicie look away. “I suppose Ivar”s never changed either, has he?” Her words pattered with despair.

  “No.”

  Abruptly she got up and said, “I”d better go back,” then added as if recanting something, “Give my love to Zoë!”

  Ridiculous and touching in the magenta bathing cap, she eased into the water and started to return the way she had come.

  After a while Rayner too swam to the shore. His damaged foot had started to ache, throbbing as if the bone marrow were filled with nerves. He lay down and heaped the soft earth into a cushion beneath it. When Zoë found him, he was fast asleep.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  She stood gazing down at him. She looked as he most loved her to look. From time to time, as now, something ignited in her this glow of tenderness. Even at meals, she might reach out with a sensitivity strange after her withdrawal, and cup his face in her hands to steady it, before settling to gaze at him. So now her eyes had gone gentle and alert, and she sat down and tentatively touched his foot. So that was it: his foot.

  She said, “You never talk about it, so I don”t know when it”s hurting.”

  “I don”t think about it much.”

  She ran her fingertips over the permanently swollen ankle. “But it must remind you.”

  “Yes, of course it does.” Some roughness reentered his voice. “I don”t mean it reminds me of the accident. I had amnesia. But it reminds me of my mother”s death. It”s like carrying it about with you.” And the end of your youth too, he thought angrily, and your exile to this bloody place. “You imagine that if it wasn”t there, you”d forget.” But of course you wouldn”t, he knew. He sat up and stared down his body with distaste. “Zoë, you and I should have a pact to ban pity.”

  She said, “Why should we be frightened of it, d”you suppose?” She lifted his wrenched foot to her lips. Its bones stuck out like harp strings. She kissed them one by one.

  He said, “I”m not frightened.”

  She answered astonishingly, “I am.” Her fingers trickled over his foot. “If I thought you were sorry for me, I”d start to feel pitiful. Then I”d lose myself.”

  In the sunless day the only sign of dusk was an overall dimming, as if a great lamp had been turned down behind the sky.

  She said, “We should go soon.”

  They wandered back to dress for supper. Zoë remade her face. When it was done, she went on glaring longer than usual into the mirror, hunting for any fissures in her immaculacy. Rayner studied her, wondering; he wanted to touch her, but did not.

  “It”s our last evening.”

  Then she entered the dining room in the tight black dress which reminded him of her leotard—the high breasts and slender body attracting the attention she craved like a defiant child. And back in their villa the whole charade was washed away. But she answered his lovemaking with a self-obliterating need, her eyes clenched shut, and fell asleep with her fingernails still sharp in his back. For a long time afterwards he lay awake, and at midnight went out onto the verandah to look at the lake. But it was invisible in haze.

  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.

  CHAPTER

  9

  The 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 fou
nd 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.

  CHAPTER

  10

  They 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?”