Turning Back the Sun(19)

He sensed that she carried with her a past as disjoined as his own. At first, because she didn”t refer to it, he thought her secretive. Then he realized that she just wanted to forget: she despised self-pity. For years after leaving the capital she had lived hand-to-mouth, performing in theater and cabaret. She had started to drink too much; and yes, there had been many men.

She spoke without regret. She wanted him to know. After leaving dance academy, she said, she might have entered the state ballet company. But she”d fallen in love with jazz and flamenco, and joined a mime theater instead. “Everybody said I was mad, because we were openly political. Our director behaved as if the country was as free as it pretended to be, and we did shows about every state farce and corruption.” She laughed ruefully. “But we were just children, of course, trying to make the world all right.”

Rayner wondered in astonishment how this little theater had survived in the twenties, when censorship in the capital had been as harsh as during the war. But within a year, she said, they were all being persecuted. She had been living with one of the actors and become pregnant, when they were denounced to the authorities. She was warned that unmarried motherhood was an abuse to the state. Her parents refused to see her again unless she agreed to an abortion.

“But I could feel the baby already alive in me.” Her voice emptied of any tone, as if against weeping. At eight months she had given birth to a stillborn boy, and for an instant had held him in her hands, and seen his expression.

She detached Rayner”s arms from her, as if they could not comfort. After a while, with sudden, bitter humor, she said: “In the puritan crackdown I got reassigned to other work. Dancers like me were listed Grade Seven, along with prostitutes and gypsies. I was told to start clerical training.”

“Did you?”

“No. I said I”d rather lose my residence permit than stop dancing. So I was reassigned here.” She added grimly, brutalizing herself. “Basically, I was chucked out.”

Her honesty, especially when turned on herself, sounded almost callous. He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. He did not understand this obscure battle to dance.

But four years ago, she said, for no reason she knew, her suffering—this shadow-boxing with herself and with authority—had eased. She had stopped drinking. She had started living alone, and had adopted the discipline of yoga. Once she tried to explain this to him, but only ended in confusion. “We”re getting into deep water!”

But every afternoon by the lake she would disappear for an hour. The shoreline was littered with flat, seal-grey rocks belted with the marks of seasonal evaporation, and on one of these she would settle, facing the sun. Then her prayer-like stretchings and bendings would begin, the private suppleness which would bring her feet close against her breast or arch them behind her back. She doubled and twisted, did headstands and shoulder-stands or balanced with one leg behind her neck, all in a rhythmic, concentrated calm.

Meanwhile he swam or lay reading, and watched the wind chafe or polish the lake surface, while often the far shore stood invisible in haze, as if this were indeed the ocean of their childhood memory. But in fact its water rested tideless against the rocks, and its mood and beauty were beginning to depend on her. Her sudden fervors and withdrawals were starting to obsess him. In conversation she poured questions over him—straightforward but demanding ones about anything she didn”t know—with that disturbing innocence of hers. She would listen to him with an almost anguished attention, which would then fade for no reason he could guess, and suddenly return.

Even in bed she often clasped him with an impassioned, hurt need, as if she had nothing else in the world, and when she stared at him he felt her pulling out love through his eyes, scouring his skull clean. So he made love to her in a euphoria of longing, tinged with sorrow. Yet at other times, as if from years of wounding, she would show only a detached affection; then she seemed to be holding back some vital part of her, and proving to herself, with a raw sadness, that she was, after all, separate. Once, sensing this, he asked, “Do you want me to go to sleep?”—and she nodded, filling him with a pang of intense, hopeless separation.

Now in the morning, when he lay idle on the lake”s verge, the offshore islands seemed to rage or go melancholy, depending on the night before. In some way, he realized, he had fallen in love with her.

But just as she incarnated two different women, so she demanded two men of him. The man who intrigued her with conversation during the day—”my pet brain”—was not allowed to possess her at night. For this she turned him into someone else. For a while her gaze would drain him and her body would cling, as if they might complete one another. Then she would say, “Don”t talk. Just love me,” and close her eyes. She wanted him both as lover and friend, but the two could not, in the end, overlap. The man who entered her had to be a stranger.

Once, watching her writhe in his arms as if in some private trance, he said bemusedly, “I might as well be a stud.”

Her eyes opened in distress. “No … no. It”s not important.”

“What isn”t?”

“Sex.” She looked shy, as if she had just focused him. “I”ve never really wanted sex.”

He drew back from her, astonished. He”d believed her more erotic than him. She”d had affairs since she was sixteen.

She said, “I”ve only wanted male companionship, in the end. That”s why I went wild as a girl. I just wanted to be held.”