Turning Back the Sun
Colin Thubron
CHAPTER
1
You can never go back. Deep ranges of mountain isolate the town from the sea, and lift across half the skyline. From any rooftop you may see them rising, at once threatening and unreal. No road penetrates them, and the narrow-gauge railway is unsure and precipitous. But the people in this frontier town have become inured to where they are now. It consumes all their ambitions. Even its ugliness, they say, is compelling. Besides, they have no residence permit for anywhere but here.
In the town you often forget that other places exist. At night, especially, it glitters self-contained in the circle of its lights. On its perimeter the roads merge into scrubland so abruptly that you pass horses standing asleep on the tarmac, and under the last street lamps graze desert antelopes. Then the northern mountains are obscured in dark, and on the other side the wilderness spreads in a huge, lightless vacancy, and seems obscurely to breathe. All the absorbed vapors of the day are released back into the dark, so you imagine you can hear the whole desert sighing in a long, unbroken exhalation.
By daylight, Rayner noticed, the town seemed self-sufficient. It was robust, dangerous even, steeped in an unholy vitality. Under the angry sun, its streets churned with traffic and the pavements brimmed with an appearance of business: men and women in styleless shirts and trousers, forcing transactions, chasing appointments, selling things. Its municipal buildings, conceived in a squat style of Doric Greek—the Court House, the Municipality—the Department of Transport and Works—might have been raised for a miniature nation. But around them the shops and offices elbowed one another in an earth-bound sprawl. They were built of concrete, or of the blood-colored local stone, and above their awnings the shopping malls belched up a mélange of thickset fa?ades. There was nothing older than a century.
When Rayner first arrived from the capital fifteen years ago, sick with insomnia after two nights on the railway, he had passed under a makeshift arch of welcome blazoned “We”ve got everything here.” During the next few years he had heard the same expression often, spoken in the town”s clipped patter, but edged with an odd disillusion. Yet he had believed it then (he was only nineteen).
Even at that time it was called a “purpose town.” Nobody arrived for pleasure. They came—or were sent—to engage in industry or administration. The town became their pleasure incidentally. They made money. Their residence permit, the tyrannical blue booklet of government control, shackled them to the place for life, and to them the distant capital became more like a memory-trace than a real city. Even Rayner, who was angry and nostalgic, sometimes imagined that he had never been anywhere but here.
Yet there were days when he saw a different town. Avoiding the streets” crush at noon, he would sometimes go into one of the big, heavy-carpeted bars where people sat in near silence over their lagers or aquavit. Then he would sense the town”s desperation. He saw it in the people”s faces when they were alone. They looked haunted. They belonged to no real community. They were a conflation of exiles. You only had to read the owners” names above the shops: Pacini, Ridderbusch, Smith, Seifert, Ling, Moreau … A superficial sameness of dress or manner might unite them, but if you looked or listened closer the town lost all identity. A murmur of unfamiliar accents and dialects undermined it: men and women with the faint idioms, the gestures and physiognomy, the memories, of somewhere else. In the privacy of their homes they clung to the flotsam of a lost security. The immigrant Lebanese and Syrians returned at night to neat bungalows, like other people, but once inside they sipped their coffee around trays of Damascus brass and sat on inlaid kursi. The Cantonese hung their walls with reproduction scrolls, and on their Western tables sat little trays of Taoist water gardens. Latvians sang cold Nordic songs in the streets. A barrio of Filipinos imported their own mongo beans and noodles, and in the German Club the bar was carved with the heraldic arms of Hohenstaufen counts. Czechs, Poles, Greeks, Italians, Hungarians—they heard of their motherlands” betterment or sufferings only with a dimmed guilt or dissociation. They belonged here now, or nowhere.
As for the capital—the shimmering city on the coast which had first harbored them and where many had been born—they seemed purposely to exclude all mention of it from their talk.
Once it had accommodated everything meaningful in the colony: wealth, administration, political faith. But by the end of the nineteenth century the city had overflowed, and the drift of people south into the savage hinterland had begun. During the Great War the dictatorship had regulated all movement, resettling populations by financial inducement or brute force, and even now, far into the thirties, the economic pressures which push people to the frontier towns are hardened by government decree. Often the whole country seems immobilized, locked into self-contained provinces, like a house without passageways.
Rayner”s medical partner, an elderly Pole, told him bitterly, “You overestimate the people in this town. They may look preoccupied, but they”re not thinking anything. They can”t afford to. They”re like animals. Sophisticated animals. They live day to day.” So perhaps they were not melancholy after all, Rayner thought, just inert. Above their beer mugs and whisky glasses their eyes seemed blank and undreaming. Then he thought, I”ve just read into them my own state.
He was less assimilated than anybody here. He had been assigned to the town”s medical school from the capital, then posted to a local practice; and nothing could bring about a reversal. The town needed doctors. In the capital his parents were both dead, and he could summon no compassionate grounds for his return there except: over there is my home. Which was not enough.