Turning Back the Sun(13)
“My people were schoolteachers from the coast.” She gave a sad laugh, as if acknowledging the incongruity. “I drove them mad from the start, I was such a rebel. When they got angry, they”d call me “the changeling.” Later, I won a scholarship to the dance academy in the capital, and now we don”t even exchange letters anymore.” She lifted her chin with an odd, hurt self-command. “There isn”t any point.”
He wondered how she had ended up here, but did not like to ask.
She was sitting self-consciously upright now, embattled. “When I left the academy there weren”t many jobs.” She added simply, “Later I came here.”
Her account—they both knew—resounded with gaps and silences; but he sensed that hers was a past less of scandal than of wilfulness and rebellion, and maybe of political na?vety. She”d simply gone her own way, and had perhaps arrived here by default.
She asked, “What about you? Are you married?”
He shook his head.
She said, “I”ve noticed you before in the streets. You”re always on your own.” “I”m a doctor.”
“Yes, I know …” She was not flirting with him, but he wondered what had elicited this tinge of condolence. What did he look like in the streets? Just overworked, he imagined. But occasionally he had caught sight of himself in a shop mirror—taking his reflection by surprise—and had glimpsed a face more gaunt and hard than the one he had reckoned on.
Zo? said astonishingly, “You don”t look happy.” Her accent had slid back into the lilt of the capital.
“Happy?” He burst into contradictory laughter. “Yes, I”m happy sometimes, when I”m not thinking about it. On a good day, I”m happy working.” He glanced at his watch. He was already ten minutes late.
But it was hard—ludicrously hard—to let this woman go, just to say, “Goodbye, then,” and to carry on. His own indecision surprised him. His hands were toying with the tablecloth. Then he and Zo? stood up together.
He said, “Come and have supper one evening after you”ve finished dancing.”
She looked momentarily surprised, and for another instant gazed at him rather gravely, as if assessing something. Then she said, “I”d like that.”
CHAPTER
7
The road to the wilderness crossed the river and passed through the mines. Among their discolored slag heaps the wheels of the winder-houses turned in slow motion, and above them, from a stack fifty meters up in the sky, the smoke from the smelter plant unfurled a long, black banner over the town. Then the installations dwindled through a slovenly amphitheater of hills, where a narrow-gauge railway trailed over mineral pinks and greys.
The road held the plume of smoke in view for ten kilometers into the wilderness. The car wheels lisped over tarmac and a film of sand. Recently, whenever he could find time, Rayner had taken to driving alone into this emptiness: a savannah of stunted acacia and whitened grass whirring with cicadas. He felt eased here. It was a kind of shriving. All the vehemence and frustration of the town seemed to dissipate without hiatus into the empty circle of the horizon. The grey-red earth was soft, cracked, and the sky hung unchanging: a land without purpose or memory. It put him at peace.
Once he passed a shrunken water hole where some natives were grazing their cattle. Their bullocks” haunches stuck out like knives. He lifted his hand in greeting, but they only stared. Beyond, the grasslands merged again into the plains, spiked with saltbush and desert oaks. There was no wind. The leaves hung limp, and the steppe ran to the sky like a faded carpet.
On his old War Ministry map a dotted line led to a faded asterisk, the site of native rock paintings. Two of the older townsmen had faintly remembered seeing them, sheltered in a hollow. But for years nobody had been there. Leszek, who had visited them as a youth almost fifty years ago, could not remember what they depicted. He”d only said, “You can”t go there now, surely? To one of the savages” places? Oh no, not after what”s been happening…. They”d kill you.”
“It”s deserted, isn”t it?”
“I don”t remember. With the savages you can”t always tell …”
In the end Rayner had resorted to a book written forty years earlier by a missionary who had tried to convert the elusive wilderness tribes. It pinpointed the site thirty-two kilometers southeast of the town: “a rocky hollow, still a shrine of the local tribespeople. Its paintings are crude and much faded …”
The tarmac road had dwindled to sand long before another track—no wider than a footpath—bifurcated to the east. Rayner followed it gingerly over the hardened ground. It seemed to go on for a long time. Once or twice, where the earth lightened, he thought he was approaching cornfields, but they resolved into faded grass on a faded earth.
Then the track stopped dead. The hollow opened so abruptly beneath him that only the sudden green of its treetops gave warning. It was small, circular—an eccentric dimple in the plain. It looked like what it could not be: the mouth of a buried volcano.
He peered over the edge. The place seemed empty. A few gum trees lifted from the dust. A depleted water hole stared from its grass like a sunken eye. The heat had grown intense. Rayner scrambled down and began to circle the hollow. Sometimes the soft earth had dropped from its banks to show scraps of schist-like rock. He scrutinized their surfaces for paintings, but found none. Only at the base of one he was surprised to come upon a bowl of plaited cane filled with withered berries. Laid on twigs at the foot of the rock face, it must have been somebody”s tribute or thanksgiving. But to whom? The scarp showed nothing.