Turning Back the Sun

by Colin Thubron

  “Yes,” he said. “I”m all right.”

  The sweat had dried on his forehead, and even his anger had ebbed. But he pulled the towel from his case and wiped his hands, his neck, his lips, over and over. He just wanted to get out of here.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Rayner”s villa had subtly transformed. During the seven years he had lived there, it had continued to look bare, cool and too big for him, as if briefly rented. It resembled, in fact, the place of transition he believed it to be.

  But Zoë vitalized it. She came and went between the villa and her flat, borrowing his books and bringing back textiles or rugs which she hung on the offending blank walls. He enjoyed the way she moved so easily in and out. They seemed to have an unspoken treaty not to coerce one another. Sometimes she would stay for a few hours, sometimes for several days. He never knew. But where previous girlfriends had tried to feminize the villa, suggesting prettier curtain designs or buying him vases and ornaments, Zoë left behind a bright, personal trail of things she had forgotten or wanted him to keep, and spread a kind of zany Bohemia. It was oddly uninvasive. She would appropriate a wall or an alcove, impatient with its starkness, then forget whatever she had put there—a copper bowl, a flowering shrub, a stuffed armadillo—and sometimes replace it later as if it had been his. At other times she would discover mementoes and photographs which he had stowed away in the louvered cupboards, and would impudently set them up on view. “There! Why do you hide your past from me?” And he would find himself living with his parents again in the inaccessible capital.

  Little by little, to his secret pleasure, her possessions intermingled with his. Her novels and yoga manuals became incorporated among his medical texts, histories and travel books, and his classical records were infiltrated by jazz. In the bedroom cupboards her summer dresses came to hang among his drab jackets, and a flotilla of small shoes appeared; and when he hunted the bathroom shelves for razor blades he found her setting-pins and tweezers instead.

  Usually she brought her cat with her: the only guarantee of an overnight stay. It was mercurial, independent and a little fierce, like her. Its variegated coat, he told her, was a symbol of her personality, and depending on her mood he would lift the creature up in front of her and point to an area of fur—black, brindled, white or furious orange. He had come to sense when she wanted to be alone by the preoccupied way she moved about; then he would simply lift up the cat, point to black fur and disappear into his study or the garden. Her moods, he sensed, were a part of her self-reassurance. They were saying, “I do not belong to him.” They made him perversely sad. He loved her independence; but it unnerved him.

  Their working hours were at odds. In the morning, after finishing her dance exercises, Zoë went out to teach yoga to bored businessmen”s wives, who averted their collective gaze from what she did in the evening, but who all wanted to look like her. At dusk, just as he returned, she would be gone, and he would enter rooms in which the musty odor of his own solitude had been replaced by the smells of her day: nail varnish, vegetarian cooking, cat food, and the sweetish scent of her sweat after exercise. And on the bed two or three of her costumes would lie discarded in a shimmering pile of lamé, aigrette and batwing sleeves.

  On one of these evenings he returned to a letter from his aunt in the capital. The writing on the envelope had become a tremulous mockery of its old self, but the message inside retained the austere factuality of his father”s sister. “My health has declined,” she wrote, “and I am arranging for the eventual disposal of this house. As you are my closest surviving relative, it will pass to you, and I will inform you when the lawyers need your attendance. Your temporary residence permit here can be arranged.”

  He tried to imagine her. Even fifteen years ago, when he”d last seen her, she had looked formidably old. After his father”s death she had continued to come to lunch on most Sundays—to his mother”s distress—wearing a brown bombazine dress, long out of fashion. A quaint toque hat generally roosted on her head, he remembered, but this was the only ridiculous thing about Aunt Birgit. The moment she removed it, you were confronted by a face of white, aquiline power.

  Rayner”s sudden elation had nothing to do with the money. It was the prospect of the capital which filled him with impatience.

  “Who is this aunt?” Zoë asked.

  “She”s my father”s younger sister. She never married. But everything I heard about her came from my parents, and that wasn”t much. So when you ask who she is, I realize I don”t know. As a boy I was a bit in awe of her.” His childhood had been full of people like that, he remembered: people of whom “Who is she?” died on the lips. “I could never picture her young.”

  Zoë listened. Rayner intrigued her when he tried to imagine people”s lives, because that was not the sort of imagining she could do. She embraced or rejected people on instinct.

  “I think my aunt must be dying. She owned this house on the same street as ours. It”s valuable.” But when he thought about how little it interested him, he felt distantly sad for her: this old woman, who would die out there on the fringes of his memory, leaving nothing to anybody loved. All at once he asked Zoë, “Do you need money?”

  “No!” She laughed, suddenly tender. “What would I need money for?”

  “Cat food?” How strange, he thought. Money could do so little for either of them. The recognition of this must separate them from almost anybody else in the town. “My aunt must have more influence than I thought,” he said. “She says she can get me a two-week residence permit.”

  “It”d be good for you to go back. You”ll see your old friends.” But Zoë said this gravely, as if after long silence, touching his chest with her fingertips, and he realized that the idea unnerved her. “You”ll see the sea.” He sensed her apprehension. He was going away to the city most natural to him, from which she had been banished. She took up the letter to reread it, then tossed it back onto the table. “You”ll pick up old threads.” But she could not keep still, as if the carpet were shifting under her feet.

  Rayner felt a warm, selfish relief at these symptoms of her love, her dependence. But a growing wretchedness too. Because he knew that one day he would go back for good. He said, “Do you have any family or contacts left there?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder how much things have changed.” He began to sound falsely jocular, because he felt guilty. “There might be new job openings for you, something you could get a residence permit for.” But the moment he said this he realized it was fantasy. Who ever went up to the capital from a provincial cabaret? Yet guilt and sadness drove him on: guilt that it would be this city—perhaps soon—which would separate them. He did not want to think about it. He wanted to believe that she would be there too. “I could look around for you.”

  But Zoë was suddenly angry. All the lines of her face converged on her eyes. “Why the hell should I go back there? What”s the point? They killed off their floor shows years ago. There”s nothing left but puppets and ballroom dancing!”

  He said, “You”ve kept so fit, you could go back into ballet.”

  “Ballet!” She spat out the word. “Why should I go back into the ballet? I left the capital to get away from all that. Christ. Dying swans and Sleeping Beauties! I just don”t feel like that. I”m not a swan, and I”m not beautiful.” She washed a hand across her face as if wiping off its mask. “At least the dancing here is true. It”s mine. Why should I dance falsely there when I can dance properly here?”

  “For one thing, you”d get a better kind of spectator …” Rayner was starting to hate himself. But he could not believe that in her heart she did not want to return.

  “God damn the spectators!” She glared at him. “I”ll dance just for myself if I have to. At least that”d be better than pretending!” She stared down at her feet. “I couldn”t go back to that bloody ballet. I haven”t done an entrechat in ten years. Anyway, how do you know a theater audience is any better? Those posh peo
ple. They”re probably wanking in their pants just like in the nightclub.” Once, in a priggish moment, Rayner had attributed her swearing, when she became excited, to “the coarseness of her profession.” She had not forgiven this. “Yes, I know what you”re thinking, they”d never talk like that in the capital.”

  “You were born near the capital. You should know.”

  “I don”t give a fuck for the capital. I”m here. Now. And that”s okay with me, except that you”re … you”re …” She faltered. She made as if to face him, but did not, and he saw that her cheeks were shining with tears, “… Except that you”re obsessed with going back.”

  Then she thrust back her shoulders, uncaring of her face for once, which was bleeding mascara and tears, and faced him squarely. “How long have we been lovers? Three months now. And you haven”t understood a thing.”

  But they both knew that beneath his speciousness he was saying: I mean to return to the capital for good. I wish you could come too.

  And that she was answering: You know I can”t.

  She went off into another room, slamming the door behind her. Rayner stayed where he was, kicking at the table leg, too proud to follow and apologize. Sometimes, he thought, Zoë appeared to have lost hope, and was just angrily resigned to where and who she was; but at other times, as now, she simply seemed realistic, and made him feel a child.

  He pushed open the door. She was perched on the kitchen table, inspecting the cat. She had let her hair down in an act of unconcern. The cat”s claws were tangled in it. The mascara had dried on her cheeks.

  She looked up and said at once, “How can I explain to you? I”m not happy with what I”m doing, but it”s the best I have to go on with. If I could, I”d make the world different, but I can”t. So I dance my kind of dance in the only place that will accept me.” She detached the cat”s claws. “I”m sorry it”s not the state opera house.”

  He felt too ashamed to touch her. He went to the sink and started washing glasses which she had already washed. “You pour so much energy into your work…. It just annoys me that it”s only for those…. They”re only hoping you”ll strip …” He ended lamely, “You know I admire your dancing.”

  But when he watched her dance now he did not know whether he was admiring it through her, or loving her through it. Sometimes, unpredictably, she would arrive home glowing with the applause she had received: generally from the middle-aged people who came early in the evening. Then the depth of her pleasure moved him, and he would be astonished again at this violent, hopeless quest for recognition in such a place, and at her refusal to become what it wanted her to be.

  She said more softly, “I don”t see the differences in people like you do. You always see the differences. But even the men in that club aren”t all bad, and maybe something I do gets home to one or two of them, and they think that”s dancing, instead of what they”re usually thinking.”

  Rayner took her head in his hands, not knowing if she would wrench it away, but she only looked down. When he picked the cat out of her lap and pointed to its furious orange fur, a wavering smile started on her mouth, then disappeared.

  Suddenly he said, “I”m sorry,” and the words sounded intense, broken. Sorry, they were saying, not only for his misconceived wishes for her, but for his own divisive hopes, which were for himself. Yet he felt that he did love her, in his fractured and limited way, quite violently.

  She said, “I”m not ashamed of what I do.”

  “I know. That shows.” She carried a kind of flawed pride with her, and this self-image seemed to establish her literal worth. But the ambience in which it played itself out was endlessly confusing to him, as if the strippers, the dimmed lights, the prurient audience painted over her a thin, contaminating varnish.

  Yet he was erotically proud of the dancer on the little stage. He loved her body in motion. Even at home, when she dressed or undressed, he would watch the lift of her soft arms and tight breasts, the flicker of her calves. And when she emerged into the club”s spotlight, slimmer and more vivid than her daytime self, he would sense the restlessness of other men all round him. “She”d be a hard lay,” he heard one man mutter. But their anger, if it came, was only frustration, he knew, because her dance was saying: I am like this, but you cannot have me. Then he would realize with wonder that her inaccessible beauty would lie beside him tonight.

  Loving her, he told her playfully, was like enjoying illusion and reality together.

  “But I don”t dance an illusion,” she said crossly. “I”m the only one who doesn”t.”

  “Perhaps you only imagine you”re dancing your real self,” he teased her. “All that going into battle. All that apparent confidence. Showing off your body.”

  “That”s too clever,” she said.

  But the important thing was momentarily to believe the illusion, Rayner thought, and there swam into his head a memory of small girls dancing in somebody”s hall. They were rigged out in white- and silver-woven tutus and crowns. It was his job to keep the gramophone wound up and playing The Sleeping Beauty. Jarmila—blonde, twelve-year-old Jarmila—was the acknowledged ballerina among them (even by Miriam, who was proud) and her conviction carried the day. She performed precocious bourrées and arabesques. Unlike Zoë, she knew that she was beautiful, and a swan. It was a matter of who you imagined you were.

  It was late. Zoë put the cat to bed on its cushion. Then she cleansed her face, swearing at its smeared mascara. “How long have I been looking like that? You must have been laughing at me.”

  “I wasn”t.”

  For a while she lay sexlessly in his arms, withdrawn into one of her darknesses. At such moments, with deepening wretchedness, he felt her imprisoned in a past which he could not enter, back in the shadow of her parents, her merciless lovers, her stillborn child.

  He wanted to make love to her, as if this were to give her something. But it might be her gift to him. “I”m sorry I was such a fool.”

  “Don”t talk.” Her body turned against his. “You can tell me I”m beautiful if you like.” That was the sadness in her speaking. “Otherwise don”t talk.”

  But he demanded between kisses, “Why not talk? Do you sometimes try to forget me when we make love?”

  But she only frowned. “Perhaps I”ve had the wrong sort of men for too long. You”re not that sort of man.” She touched his head to her breast. “Perhaps I can”t associate sex with love anymore. I don”t know.” Yet she seemed unconscious of the pathos in the conjecture. “I don”t know what any of it means.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  As Rayner finished his morning clinic and checked the waiting room, he found Leszek”s last patients huddled round the walls with their gaze averted from its center. There, immobile on their quilt, sat the old savage and his blank-faced daughter. She was wearing the same crumpled white dress, but her father had put on a loose-fitting shirt and bound his grey hair with a headband. They sat there like emanations of the wilderness. Nobody even glanced at them. But as the old man lumbered to his feet, the incongruity of his standing there, so rough-hewn and immobile, seemed to deplete him. His open-air majesty had dropped away. He looked rather helpless.

  He said, “I come because I think something not right when I in that place. You say, if you get to town, come see me.”

  Rayner led him into his room, and the girl followed. The other patients” faces lifted in unison to watch them.

  The old man sat down on the edge of the examination couch. The girl fidgeted beside him. Her movements were sudden and frightened. And now Rayner saw that her father was changed. He seemed no longer to control the bulk of flesh which enclosed him. His life had shrivelled inside it. Even his expression seemed to have withdrawn into his thicket of beard and locks, leaving little behind but a swarming nose and overcast eyes.

  Rayner said: “What do you feel is wrong?”

  The old man flexed his arm, testing it. “It went wrong back there, in that place, three days ago.” His look of
puzzlement, the natives” knotting of nose and brows, seemed suddenly fitting. He gazed at Rayner. “I wake up with this feeling, like a ghost has been living in me. Yes, like that. Like somebody done something to me in the night while I”m sleeping. But there”s nobody been in that place for two days. Just me and my daughter.”

  “What did it feel like?”

  “Well, I get up thinking: who”s been here? Then I bend for my trousers and my fingers don”t take them. My arm is somewhere else, it”s left me. So I say to my daughter, pick up my trousers. I say that in my head, but my mouth doesn”t make words at all. See, I”ve lost my control. As if my body taken by some other feller. So I pick up the trousers with my other hand, and that”s okay. But when I try talk again the words come out wrong, like a baby. Yes, that”s how it is, like a baby.”

  When Rayner examined him he found, as he expected, that his blood pressure was high; and on its left side the corrugations of his forehead had relaxed unnaturally, and a faint slackness released one corner of his mouth.

  “You didn”t see yourself in a mirror after this?”

  “Mirror?” A guttural laugh rocked the man”s shoulders. “What”d an old man have a mirror for? I given up looking at myself. I done with all that.”

  “Did you have trouble eating?”

  “The girl says the food come out of my mouth. Yes, I find it in my beard. But not anymore. Is okay now.” “What about your eyes?”

  “Eyes, they”re hard to shut at first.” He dug his fingers into their lids. “When we started out to town, everything worse than now. But it gets better with walking.”

  “How long were you walking?”

  “Two days.”

  Rayner thought: then he”s still strong, he may carry on for a few years.

  The old man settled his look of puzzlement on him, but with an unfocused gaze, as if he descried some figure on a skyline deep in Rayner”s skull. “So what is this thing? Is it one of those that come back?”