Turning Back the Sun(11)
The woman began to sob. Leszek put out a hand to her, withdrew it.
“You”ve been listening to fairy tales.” Rayner lost his temper. “Is this town going mad, or what? This condition can”t be sexually transmitted, so don”t punish your wife with your ignorance!” If the woman had not been there he would have added: it may be a symptom of cancer. But instead he said, “What do you know about disease? Anything at all?” The man was silent. “Then listen to doctors and not to eyewash.”
But the man”s bluster concealed an animal fear, he knew. Rayner knew because he felt the same fear, faintly, in himself: an irrational tremor of unease. The discoloration was only a symptom of inner disorder, of course, but the singularity of its deep shade and outline disturbed him as if it were some magic.
The woman was trying to put on her shoes, but in her weakness she could not buckle them. Rayner bent down and helped her. He squeezed her arm. “It”s not a crime to be ill.”
After they had gone, Leszek gazed at him. “I don”t understand.” He lifted the blood sample to the window light, as if his naked eye might discern something strange. Normally he did not ask Rayner for advice, but now he said, “What do you think?”
Rayner said brusquely, remembering the reception area full of patients, “It”s probably hormonal.” He suddenly did not want to think about it.
“I don”t believe that.” Leszek”s face—a landscape of too-thin bones and tissues—was accusing him. “And you don”t think so, really?”
“It”s impossible to tell.” Now he was treating Leszek as if his partner had contracted some contagion. Leszek had always been too susceptible, he thought: a taxing mixture of frailty and pride.
Leszek turned away and repeated thinly, “It”s not hormonal.”
Rayner noticed that his head was trembling. But his partner had always been like that, he thought—over-imaginative. Leszek”s past, haunted by czarist Russia, had taught him to fear. Years ago, Rayner remembered, Leszek had lent him one of his old suitcases, the battered luggage of his refugee years, and Rayner had seen that it was glazed with shallow scorch marks. Methodically, scrupulously, Leszek must have burnt away all the labels stuck to it, so that nobody would be able to tell from where he had come.
CHAPTER
6
If the town had a heart—and cynics doubted this—it beat in the mall. All the town”s nervous sense of purpose, its buoyancy, its latent unease, emanated outwards from this paved half-kilometer of hectic commerce and social rendezvous. Its long bars were always packed. The restaurants flaunted expatriate cuisine, and enfiladed the passing crowds with the lilt of Irish ceilidh or Neapolitan songs. Their names were all of other places: the Vienna Café, the Taj Mahal, London Restaurant, the Temple of Heaven…. Anywhere but here. Yet here, in the illusion of the town”s heart, a practical zeal seemed to unite the marching mass of pedestrians. Even the Babel of immigrant languages had merged into the town”s own coarse, quick lingo. Walking by twos and threes, they laughed together. The economy was running high this year. Only when alone, the familiar tension surfaced in their tight mouths and stares.
Nobody looked at the savages perched on their steps and benches, but Rayner knew they no longer went unnoticed. The murders in outlying farms, which had risen to four, had sent an ambiguous frisson through the town—a mixture of fear, half-pleasurable excitement, and underlying anger. Only the natives seemed oblivious of this, and still wandered the streets with their frowns furrowed at something else, and sang their songs at night along the river.
Rayner never walked in the mall without thinking: here I am in the core of the town, and this is all there is. The townspeople were so oddly dedicated to their lives, so vigorous and motivated. They had successfully turned their backs on anything but themselves. Sometimes he felt as if he had aged unbearably here. Once or twice, when he could snatch ten minutes from his rounds, he had simply sat in the mall and watched it.
Even in May, with the heat intensifying, the date palms and hibiscus made pools of scent and shadow, and along the benches beneath them an audience of old men in shorts and wide-brimmed hats monitored the bustle. Rayner wondered what they were seeing. They resembled some ancient theatrical chorus. Years of harsh sun had driven the glitter of life deep inside their skulls. In them the town seemed to be watching itself, but with blank eyes.
Rayner snatched his lunch at Nielsen”s Baked Potato kiosk, a portable oven rigged up like a caravan. Its cook was a gentle-mannered savage girl (who was to disappear in time), one of the rare natives to have taken work in town. He wanted to ask if people had changed towards her, but instead took his potato in its paper cup and walked away.
In the mall”s center a chess tournament was in progress. Everywhere but here the thoroughfare was paved with small, lava-like blocks, but under the central clump of palms and daturas the black and white paving slabs formed the board for giant chessmen. Across it the local masters prowled among their wooden pieces as if personally implicated in their fate. But the queens” and knights” faces had been worn away, so the players looked as if they were moving pigs and logs about, and even the spectators were mostly down-at-heel.
Rayner did not know why the back of the woman”s head in front of him looked familiar: the dancer”s hair seized back into an auburn scallop. Then she turned and he saw Zo?. She accused him laughingly, “You never stayed for my dance!”