He said, “It wasn”t always like that.” But she went on fingering through the album, perhaps trying to understand, and he began to feel ashamed as these revelations of beauty and privilege unfolded before her, because her youth had not been like that. She had rebelled. But she looked at the photographs more in bemusement than in envy. Their world seemed far away to her; her nostalgia for the city, if that is what it was, had been severed from reality. Several times she pointed to people and asked who they were: Jarmila, Leon, Adelina smiled at the tip of her finger.
“Who”s that?”
She was staring at Miriam on a picnic in a summer frock, pretending to be drunk. It occurred to Rayner that the irreverent photograph could have been of Zoë herself, ten years younger and more expensively dressed. But Miriam looked less real, ethereal almost, enclosed forever in that time and place. Zoë said wanly, “She”s attractive.” “Yes.”
“I suppose they”re all rather grand, those people, and rich.” Her voice glinted with rebellion, but her face looked pale. As she leafed through four more years, she turned rather quiet, then closed the album up. She shot him her old look of intensity, of tenderness. “Can you find that again?”
Then she stood up, as if to resume her packing, but instead faced him almost formally and said, “I didn”t mean to talk like that last night.”
He touched his hands to her shoulders. “It doesn”t matter.”
“It does matter.” She drew back from him, not in coldness or in anger, but to finish unimpeded what she had to say. “I don”t think much about the capital anymore. I”ve got bad memories. But it matters to you.” Her voice trembled a little. “For all I know, I”m running away. Perhaps the city would accuse me, because I”ve come down in the world. I never fulfilled my ambitions there, you see, all that ballet stuff. It was in the capital I first saw Swan Lake.” She pointed her balletic feet in an odd, cynical nostalgia. “My parents would despise me now, if they knew.”
Rayner did not know what to answer. He felt perversely saddened that she did not long impossibly to follow him.
She went on, “I didn”t want you to think I despised you for going. On the contrary.” She picked up the photograph album, carried it across the room and replaced it in the drawer where she had found it, as if she were burying something. She said simply, “You”re better than me.”
He scowled. “No …”
But she laughed at his expression. “Anyway, the capital”s just not my kind of place any longer. I couldn”t last there.” She wriggled her shoulders as if reviving her circulation. “I can manage here, even if that club does depress me sometimes.”
She stared out of the window into darkness, keeping her back to him so he could not see her expression, then said clearly, as if in words she had practiced, “You”ve got every right to leave.” He saw her fingers tighten on the sill. “We never promised each other anything.”
For Rayner, watching her slight figure against the darkness, this was more unbearable than anything the night before. It wrenched him back to her, and filled him with a sad, furious frustration. But he did not know whether this anger was directed at himself, or at the intransigence of state law which would separate them, or at Zoë for her disruptive courage. He came behind her and linked his hands round her waist and kissed her.
She demanded whimsically, “Shall I yell or plead? Then you can despise me.” She swivelled round in his arms and waggled her head comically in front of him. She was trying to drown her own grief as well as his. “No, I”ll torture you with the memory of my beautiful unselfishness.” Gently she unlocked his fingers round her, stepped away and began lifting down the pictures of owls she had hung near the bed. “But I”m not leaving these. I can imagine your ritzy girlfriend in the capital asking, “Who on earth gave you those vulgar birds?” “ She laid them in the case. “But I like them.”
“So do I.”
“Well you can”t have them. You”re so serious, I”m going to leave you something absolutely useless, to do you good.” She closed the case and pretended to ponder. “The stuffed armadillo, I think.”
There was no more packing to do. The room looked bare, as if it had already been abandoned. Its ceiling fans rustled unevenly. In the square of night beyond the window, the red and amber lights of the smelter stack shone like planets fallen off course. Rayner was conscious of a hovering uncertainty in Zoë”s movements, as well as in his own. He turned off a light, rearranged some books, removed his watch. When his eyes met hers, he did not know what to say. Out of his need and love for her, however constrained, and out of a sudden compassion which she would have hated, he wanted to make love to her again. But he had no right to ask, and his gaze swerved away from her. It was she, standing almost shyly on the far side of the bed, who said in a small, defensive voice, “Do you still want me?” “Of course I do.”
She did not look at him, but released her hair and dress almost in one movement. Then he took her in his arms and she buried her lips in his neck. Once, as they lay together on the bed, she grimaced at the blemish trickling from her armpit, and murmured something in the lilting cadence of the capital which sometimes returned to her when they were making love. Softly he lifted her arm from the rash and kissed it.
In the past, he knew, she had sometimes separated his daytime presence from her nighttime lover, closing her eyes and telling him not to speak, as if sex had to be anonymous. But recently this had changed, and she had looked and spoken back to him in this softened voice. It was as though the two parts of him—or of herself—were becoming one to her, and this private wound, which she could not explain, was healing.
But when she stared at him now, her eyes were brilliant and afflicting, so that he kissed away the accusation he imagined there, to close them. For an intense moment he lay motionless in her warmth, not wanting to end, and for long afterwards they stayed intertwined. But instead of tiredness he felt an inarticulate confusion. He became neurotically aware of the panting of the fans overhead, and of the dogs moaning in the suburbs. There was no trace of light in the room, and it was only by the closeness of Zoë”s breast against his that he detected her silent, internal sobbing, and realized that her face was plunged beneath his into the pillow.
But later, while he lay awake, she fell asleep. Her breathing turned quiet, and his lips against her cheek found no new tears.
CHAPTER
21
As the last bungalow lurched past his window, and the train moved north over deserted cattlelands toward the hills, Rayner was filled with relief. He watched the black streamer of the smelter stack fade beyond the engine”s bluer smoke; and as the railroad track elongated and thinned over the plain, the vast, complex burden of the town seemed to loosen and slip physically away from him. Leaning from his empty carriage, he saw the last vestiges of habitation disappear: ghostly ranches and breached fencing. There was no sign of any savages. There was no sign of life at all. All the town”s brutalizing turmoil, its hordes of semi-exiles with their laden pasts, their paranoia, were dropping away like an aching memory below the horizon.
At last he sat back and watched the wilderness passing across his window. Nothing moved in it. Over whole regions an immunizing sweep of fires had charred the earth to a fine dust, and stripped and tilted the trees. To Rayner this forbidding land seemed to isolate his own past back in the town, and prevent it from following him. He took off his sweat-stained shirt and hung it in the window. As the hills lifted round the track, and the train labored up between them, he felt as if all his imperfect adulthood, its half-loves and compromises, was dying behind him in that blighted country. Now, looking back on the plains, he could not glimpse the town at all, only a burnished waste where dead rivers went.
Then, in spite of himself, his head filled with Zoë. Imagined somewhere in the plain behind him, she suddenly seemed so localized and confined, and so far away, that he suppressed her with a choking sadness. He resented her for intruding on his elation. He waited for her face to leave him. B
ut it did not.
The train had only four passenger coaches. For the rest, he”d noticed, its trucks were heaped with funereal-looking silver-lead ingots from the mines, and slushy piles of zinc concentrate. For hours the engine heaved these into the mountains with slackening gasps, and sometimes came almost to a standstill. Treeless palisades of rock circled the track, and long valleys were hectic with scree and streams.
At nightfall Rayner stretched across his bunk in the suddenly cool air, knowing that dawn would find him less than three hours from the capital. The train roared and whistled in the dark. For all he knew he was lying in the same bed as fifteen years before, when he had journeyed into exile, sobbing because of Miriam—until the soldier in the bunk above had bellowed at him to shut up.
Now, staring up at the grimed ceiling, dulled by the drone and shudder of the wheels, he was stricken by the idea not that the capital had changed—fifteen years wasn”t long in the life of a city—but that his memory had fatally enhanced it. Nothing, surely, was ever as you remembered it. He must have forgotten a great procession of ordinariness and squalor. Even his photographs, which recorded a city anointed in sunlight, were of course selective. He felt faintly sick. The streets and houses of his youth could not have survived as he imagined them. Lying sleepless for another hour, the wheels thundering in his head, he felt his misgiving slide gradually into blackness, until he conceived that all the remembered grace and gentleness of the capital might have belonged only to the sheltered childhood which he could never reenter.
Yet his memories were too few. People leapt and vanished in them like dolphins. Where, for instance, was the waif-like Anna who gave him the crystal he”d laid on the altar? And Uncle Bernard of the colored handkerchiefs? And when he thought of his old gang—Leon, Jarmila and the others—he knew he had lost contact with all of them, and experienced a vague unease. For in their different ways, they must have flourished more than he had.
He imagined them, for some reason, as refinements of their younger selves: Jarmila and Adelina with their blonde hair now fashionably short, married to affluent government officials. Gerhard, his youthful handsomeness matured, would himself be such an official, and Leon a successful but reclusive painter. And as for Miriam …
It must have been the engine smoke blowing through the carriage window in the early morning which made Rayner dream of the fire. The hands clutching the sheet at his chest became those of a five-year-old child. He watched his mother burst through the door and stand staring at him again, but he saw her more clearly than he had in life. The gauzy smoke had thinned from round her, so that her soot-smeared face smiled from an evaporated halo. But this time she did not come to him. Her hands were behind her back, as if tied. He woke up coughing from the smoke, and realized that the sun was up and glinting in his eyes.
The country outside had changed to scrubland and orchards. The train stopped at little torpid towns where half the men looked decrepit, and the women were out of sight. A few farmers clambered on board in wide-brimmed hats and shorts, lugging old-fashioned travelling cases labelled Slezak or Larsen or Bollack. They had sun-blistered legs and arms. Sometimes they disembarked enigmatically at villages of miners or rail-workers: white bungalows clean on their stilts around wide, single streets.
An hour later Rayner glimpsed the sea; then the southern suburbs of the capital gathered round and a minute afterwards the train was easing into the station. He disembarked onto the same platform—even, he imagined, the same space—where Miriam had never said farewell. As he swung his suitcase through the barrier, the police stopped him only cursorily, and stamped his residence permit without a question. The old tension seemed to have gone. He was not even asked to register.
As he walked out of the station, his dread that the city had changed enclosed him again. But opposite him, in the young sunlight, there rose up at once the terraced and balconied mansions he remembered, with their whitewashed pediments and frail lunettes above the doors. The town he”d just left had grappled and swarmed over the earth, but this one hung in the sky with a serene assembly of spires and gables. Even the colors of its façades were pastel blues and greys, blending with cloud and air.
His memory had held true.
The street where his aunt and parents had lived was barely ten minutes” walk away. He went there in a euphoria of recognition. He felt he was breathing deeply, fully, for the first time in years. The names of all the streets and squares came back to him, and of half the shops which ran out white awnings over the pavements. He might have been sleepwalking. The whole city—avenues, lanes, crescents—shimmered a little out of focus, as if his present-day eyes could not anchor it clear of his memory. At any moment, he felt, he might encounter his teenage self swinging down the street arm in arm with Leon or Gerhard. Yet the city now was inhabited by other people. It was bewildering.
He took countless detours on the way to his aunt. Sometimes he just sat on his suitcase on the pavement and gazed. After the rumbustiousness of the town, the restraint of passersby was restful and a little strange. The cars never hooted. The height of buildings and the breadth of parks seemed to touch the inhabitants with quietness. Their history was remembered in statues, museums, even antique shops. He gazed with satisfaction at the Corinthian arcades of the State Assembly, and even at the corbels and lintels of ordinary houses. He noticed more gardens, and the steepled brick and whitewashed churches were everywhere. He thought of sitting in a coffeehouse, just to savor the languorous singsong of people”s voices, but did not.
It occurred to him with astonishment that as a youth he had inhabited this place blindly—and soon, he knew, he would do so again. But for the moment he felt outlandish. He even tried to curb his flailing foot as he walked. His clothes must brand him an outsider, he thought. Yet nobody seemed to notice him, and the people were dressed little differently from those back in the town. A few men sported linen jackets and tropical suits, and the town”s bush hats were replaced by panamas. Some of the women carried parasols and little gilded fans, which at first he thought an affectation; then he noticed, above everybody”s head, a wavering column of gnats which neither settled nor went away.
He turned at last into the street he best remembered. It was unchanged. All the balconies and verandahs frothed with wrought iron, which trickled its shadows over the peeling walls. The façade of his parents” house had been repainted in café au lait, but he craned over its railings at the same garden of jasmine and roses. Their mingled scent, sharp with the tang of the distant sea, was the fragrance of his childhood. On the lawn two fat girls were playing.
He walked on seven more doors to his aunt”s house. He could remember her from childhood already living close, mewed up in mystery, yet capable and authoritarian. He had not understood her then, and could not guess at her now. If she had any secrets, Rayner”s father had not told them, and his mother had always been afraid of her.
The door was opened by a nurse, who led him upstairs. He remembered the interior less for itself than as a facsimile of his parents” home. All color had been strained out of it by sunlight, leaving it husk-dry and mellow with fawns and golds. It resembled a sepia snapshot. The rugs, the curtains, the cane and wicker furniture—all seemed bleached to the same autumnal pallor. Vases of dried flowers and potpourri stood in niches like funerary urns, and pervaded the house with a half-dead sweetness. Even the ormolu mirrors appeared to hold in themselves nothing but a clouded, secondhand sunlight. Rayner could not believe that this house could ever be his.
“Aunt Birgit.” He was unsure how to greet her. He could not remember if he had ever kissed those cheeks.
She was sitting on the edge of her chair. Her hand, when he took it, was a sheaf of bones. All the aquiline power of her face had shrivelled to a delicate scaffolding of discolored skin. She said, “I wouldn”t have recognized you.”
He guessed she had cancer. But he realized at once that only her body had withered. Her mind glittered out through two bruised-looking eyes.
“The last years have been hard,” he said.
“Have you eaten? You cannot have eaten. The nurse will get you something in a moment, and then she”ll show you to your room. It will be a great scandal in the street that I have taken in a man.” Her laughter was like a cough. Her voice came rasping and thin, transforming the capital”s lisp to the sound of a broken wind instrument. And this was how he was to hear it during the next two weeks—so frail, so harmless-sounding: but each word a small incision.
She had arranged everything. Tomorrow in the law courts they would finalize her will: it required only his attendance and a signature. “If you decide to live in the capital,” she said, “you may stay here at once. It”s as you wish.” It was impossible to tell if she wanted this. In her voice was no hint of either plea or concession: only convenience. He wanted to thank her, but did not know how. It was like thanking someone for his resurrection. But in the end he took her hand and blundered out his gratitude in a confusion of thoughts, while she only smiled a little and at last said impatiently, “Don”t thank me. I”m not depriving myself of anything. I will not be here.”
He could not tell, from her shrunken face or voice, what she was feeling. The instruments of expression all seemed broken. He wanted to say: don”t you have other legatees? But he might as well have asked: was your life so loveless?
She said, “Doctor Morena wants to interview you one day next week. He was impressed by your articles on some disgusting skin disease. He”ll presumably ask you to join his practice, but I can”t imagine you”ll want that.”
Rayner frowned in surprise. “What”s wrong with it?”
“Nothing”s wrong with it. It”s just an ordinary urban practice. But for you I”m sure it would seem unexciting. You”ve already got a lively partnership in a busy place.”
“Lively, busy … yes, it”s certainly that!” His aunt, he thought, could have no concept of a place like the town. “But I don”t feel right there.”
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