Turning Back the Sun(25)

“Everybody was there.” Miriam glowed by his hospital bedside. “Even the side chapels were full.”

Rayner, dazed by concussion and chloroform, only now understood that she was talking about his mother”s funeral. She bent down and kissed him. He said, “What about the autopsy?”

“Oh, that was clear. Were you worried?”

“You knew her, poor mama. I hope nobody detected … alcohol.”

“Good heavens, no!” Suddenly her hands were caressing his cheeks. He was too weak to touch her. He simply stared. Her brimming body belonged so extravagantly to the wondrous species of the healthy. Her face came smiling high above his. She said, “She was cleared of all blame. How good to be the first to tell you!” Her fingers started a teasing tattoo along his plastered leg. “You were hit by one of those armored state postal vans. Their drivers are all mad.”

Rayner was to realize only by degrees that his mother was dead. Now he felt that by surviving, he had abandoned her. And there had been no goodbye. He tried to smile at Miriam. If only he could have gone to the funeral, he felt, that would have been a kind of farewell.

“It was right you didn”t go.” She lifted her chin. “It would have been cruel. Why put yourself through that? It”s better to remember happiness. Actually, I hate funerals. I think they”re morbid and pointless. It”s better to look back on the good things.”

Three times afterwards Rayner had returned to the church and sat at the rear of the empty nave, looking toward the altar. Like that, it reimposed its mystique, and there was room for God in it.

The church had awed him since childhood. Once, as a boy of ten, he had wandered in alone. He had never seen it empty before, and became afraid of the tap of his feet on the tiles. The tapers under the Virgin had gone out. But the stained-glass saints glared at him from their sun, and the memorial plaques were dripping plaster veils and fear. He tiptoed into the chancel. From their corbels he was being watched by painted angels” faces, with headbands and girlish hair. On the altar”s golden crucifix the eyes of the hanging Christ blazed out under a crown of thorns and glory. They did not see him.

On an impulse Rayner took out of his pocket the crystal given him by a scrawny waif called Anna. It was scarcely bigger than a marble, but when you shook it the glass filled with snowflakes. This mystery (he had never seen snow) and his wonder at the girl turned it unique. Gingerly he placed it at the foot of the implacable-looking Christ, and backed away. He might have meant it as an offering or a claim for Anna: a stake in holiness. He was not sure.

Next Sunday, at mass, he saw it still on the altar—a secret blasphemy—and nobody noticing. But he looked at it with despair. During the intervening days it seemed to have been sucked away from him into the aura of the crucifix. He had planned to recover it, full of manna from its adventure. But he did not dare. It was infected too deeply with the magic of the chancel, through lying hour after hour under the nailed and golden feet, bathed in the stained-glass cross fire of the saints. It had withdrawn from him. Yet for all he knew the pang of loss he felt was for the girl, who was not in church that morning, so that the crystal seemed to have returned into God, and she with it, leaving him on the far side.





CHAPTER

11

As the disease spread, and the rains did not come, the town simmered in suspension. A surface normality reigned, but a new energy went into preserving it. Even in the streets people walked with a look of responsibility, as if embattled, and their talk was edgy. Tiny distress signals multiplied. A few weeks earlier, anything thought indigenous to the land—from banana fiber to sweet potatoes—had shown a price tag stamped with a smiling native. These had now vanished; and the shops which once displayed native-woven mats and baskets were selling other things.

Everybody knew that the situation had outstripped the police, and that decisions now rested with the army. Their jeep patrols rumbled out into the country every morning, scouring the stock-breeding lands at the foot of the mountains, and sometimes at sunset, if you saw them return, you would glimpse the blank face of a captured savage among the soldiery. There were random arrests at night, usually in the dry riverbeds along the town”s outskirts. But almost nobody witnessed them. And nobody asked if the natives were returned. After a rumor that their dogs were spreading the disease, all strays were shot on sight. Yet there was no official curfew, and every morning people would wake to a new swathe of graffiti blazoned across public buildings. The latest of them, inscribed on the walls of the telephone exchange, simply said: “Kill them.”

Rayner spent more time than usual operating the erratic radiotelegraph which connected his clinic with outlying cattle stations. Many farming people only needed reassurance, but he could not truthfully give it. Their women came in pregnant from the stations now at thirty-five weeks, begging for beds. He never got away from work before dusk.

After a week of such days he emerged from his clinic to find an army staff car waiting for him. Its driver said, “There”s a job for you up at barracks, sir.” He hated being at the military”s disposal, but Leszek was too old and nervous to go. So he climbed into the car, with a vague foreboding.

In the twilight the town was closing itself down. They left behind the expensive stucco villas with their flimsy wrought iron and frangipani trees, and entered a poorer district. People had already abandoned the streets. Through the slats of their shanties, lifted on concrete stilts above the termites, faint lamplight showed or jazz drifted. Their tin roofs were rusting to shreds, and the gardens rampaged with dogs. The sun set in a torrid blur, as it had for weeks. To Rayner, feverish with humidity, it seemed that only the rain could restore this place, and cleanse the air of fear.