Turning Back the Sun(12)

“I did. But I went soon afterwards.” How extraordinary she looked, he thought, flawlessly made up at noon as if she had attended some state function. “I thought your dance was the only good thing of the evening.”

“Did you?” She sounded tentative now, so that he remembered how girlish she had become when her hair was unloosed. “You came on a bad night. I didn”t dance it well. And there were thugs in the audience.”

The crowd had edged them back against some café tables, mingling them with customers, and Rayner asked her to join him for coffee with a naturalness which vaguely surprised him. The moment they were seated he imagined how incongruous they must look: he so awkward and carelessly dressed, she high-colored and immaculate. If it were not for the severity of her dancer”s hair, he thought, people might have taken her for a high-class prostitute. As it was, she glittered incongruously in the dowdiness, and he sensed that she was enjoying the attention she was drawing—something he didn”t like in her.

He said, “That club must be a tough place to work, isn”t it?”

“Yes, but it”s a good stage—a deep stage—did you notice? And they let me do what I like … probably because they don”t care.” She laughed, then said with a sudden, edgy intensity: “So I choose the music, create the movements, then dance them. It may not seem much, but it”s better than what most people get.”

In her voice the lisping cadence peculiar to the capital still mellowed the strident dialect of the town. But this passion for dance, for sheer movement to music, was mysterious to Rayner. Even before he was lamed, he had never danced much.

She said, “You don”t understand, do you? I can tell you don”t.” She looked at him, disappointed. “But that club was better once. We did satire and jazz.”

“Why did you stay on?”

“Why?” She looked as if she had never questioned it. “I suppose dancing is something I have to do. It”s the kind of … energy—joining the music …”

Rayner stared back at her, wondering. He”d never wanted to join the music like that. Music turned him still. To him this woman seemed richly, accusingly young.

“It”s just in the body,” she said.

He remembered her body then, how it looked in the outrageous leotard. Even sitting here, she seemed to exist in a unique dimension, at once more precarious and straightforward than his own, and fuller-blooded. The passersby on the mall evoked a gale of comment and curiosity from her. “Look at that one…. How do people allow themselves to look like that, d”you think? … What a beautiful dog, did you see the dog? … Now there”s a good-looking woman…. Do you play chess? … If black doesn”t castle he”ll lose…. Oh how extraordinary, look! …”

Her observations of people—men and women—were openly sensuous. She would admire their legs or necks, their skin color, the way they walked. And when Arab music sounded from a nearby restaurant, her body began to sway. “I love that music, don”t you?”

Rayner never heard Arab singing without being struck by its exile. It belonged so deeply somewhere else, like the long-faced Syrians in their restaurant. But Zo? seemed to hear and see things in cleansing isolation, enjoying or dismissing them purely for themselves. He started to envy this a little. It was innocently healing. He found himself delighting in her earthiness, her gaiety.

“You should laugh more,” she said suddenly. “You”re getting the wrong lines.”

“What?”

She ran her fingers down his cheeks. “Your lines are starting to go the wrong way. They”re perpendicular.”

He laughed again, and found his fingers momentarily touching her cheekbones.

Hers was, he realized later, a deeply contradictory face. The dancer”s immaculacy and vividness most forcefully expressed her, a type of optimism. But beneath the blue compelling eyes and thin nose her mouth twisted up at the corners in a shy assertion of charm. He sat beside her feeling old, but bathed in her exuberance.

“It”s too late for me to get smile lines.”

He had paid the bill but realized he did not want to leave. Even in so constricted a town as this, it might be months before he encountered her again. It was not just her beauty which drew him, but her liberating, animal naturalness, and the half-discerned fragility beneath it. She seemed to need him.

So instead of saying, “I have to go now,” he heard himself ask her, “How long have you been here?”

“Nearly ten years. I came from the capital.”

“I thought so. Your accent.”

“I wish I could lose it. It sounds so affected.”

Rayner was surprised. “It”s musical. Better than the one here.”

“I prefer the accent here. I find it strong, very emphatic.” She harshened and deepened her words. “You”re from the capital too …”

“Yes.”

She was looking at him almost tenderly. “Did you leave family there?”

“No. My parents were dead when I left. Did you?”

He had no idea what she would answer. She existed so fiercely in her own right that her past was unimaginable. She seemed to live as she herself experienced things—torn up from all associations. He could not envisage her parents. If she had said her father was a factory worker or a government minister, he would not have been surprised.