Turning Back the Sun(29)

He felt too ashamed to touch her. He went to the sink and started washing glasses which she had already washed. “You pour so much energy into your work…. It just annoys me that it”s only for those…. They”re only hoping you”ll strip …” He ended lamely, “You know I admire your dancing.”

But when he watched her dance now he did not know whether he was admiring it through her, or loving her through it. Sometimes, unpredictably, she would arrive home glowing with the applause she had received: generally from the middle-aged people who came early in the evening. Then the depth of her pleasure moved him, and he would be astonished again at this violent, hopeless quest for recognition in such a place, and at her refusal to become what it wanted her to be.

She said more softly, “I don”t see the differences in people like you do. You always see the differences. But even the men in that club aren”t all bad, and maybe something I do gets home to one or two of them, and they think that”s dancing, instead of what they”re usually thinking.”

Rayner took her head in his hands, not knowing if she would wrench it away, but she only looked down. When he picked the cat out of her lap and pointed to its furious orange fur, a wavering smile started on her mouth, then disappeared.

Suddenly he said, “I”m sorry,” and the words sounded intense, broken. Sorry, they were saying, not only for his misconceived wishes for her, but for his own divisive hopes, which were for himself. Yet he felt that he did love her, in his fractured and limited way, quite violently.

She said, “I”m not ashamed of what I do.”

“I know. That shows.” She carried a kind of flawed pride with her, and this self-image seemed to establish her literal worth. But the ambience in which it played itself out was endlessly confusing to him, as if the strippers, the dimmed lights, the prurient audience painted over her a thin, contaminating varnish.

Yet he was erotically proud of the dancer on the little stage. He loved her body in motion. Even at home, when she dressed or undressed, he would watch the lift of her soft arms and tight breasts, the flicker of her calves. And when she emerged into the club”s spotlight, slimmer and more vivid than her daytime self, he would sense the restlessness of other men all round him. “She”d be a hard lay,” he heard one man mutter. But their anger, if it came, was only frustration, he knew, because her dance was saying: I am like this, but you cannot have me. Then he would realize with wonder that her inaccessible beauty would lie beside him tonight.

Loving her, he told her playfully, was like enjoying illusion and reality together.

“But I don”t dance an illusion,” she said crossly. “I”m the only one who doesn”t.”

“Perhaps you only imagine you”re dancing your real self,” he teased her. “All that going into battle. All that apparent confidence. Showing off your body.”

“That”s too clever,” she said.

But the important thing was momentarily to believe the illusion, Rayner thought, and there swam into his head a memory of small girls dancing in somebody”s hall. They were rigged out in white-and silver-woven tutus and crowns. It was his job to keep the gramophone wound up and playing The Sleeping Beauty. Jarmila—blonde, twelve-year-old Jarmila—was the acknowledged ballerina among them (even by Miriam, who was proud) and her conviction carried the day. She performed precocious bourrées and arabesques. Unlike Zo?, she knew that she was beautiful, and a swan. It was a matter of who you imagined you were.

It was late. Zo? put the cat to bed on its cushion. Then she cleansed her face, swearing at its smeared mascara. “How long have I been looking like that? You must have been laughing at me.”

“I wasn”t.”

For a while she lay sexlessly in his arms, withdrawn into one of her darknesses. At such moments, with deepening wretchedness, he felt her imprisoned in a past which he could not enter, back in the shadow of her parents, her merciless lovers, her stillborn child.

He wanted to make love to her, as if this were to give her something. But it might be her gift to him. “I”m sorry I was such a fool.”

“Don”t talk.” Her body turned against his. “You can tell me I”m beautiful if you like.” That was the sadness in her speaking. “Otherwise don”t talk.”

But he demanded between kisses, “Why not talk? Do you sometimes try to forget me when we make love?”

But she only frowned. “Perhaps I”ve had the wrong sort of men for too long. You”re not that sort of man.” She touched his head to her breast. “Perhaps I can”t associate sex with love anymore. I don”t know.” Yet she seemed unconscious of the pathos in the conjecture. “I don”t know what any of it means.”





CHAPTER

13

As Rayner finished his morning clinic and checked the waiting room, he found Leszek”s last patients huddled round the walls with their gaze averted from its center. There, immobile on their quilt, sat the old savage and his blank-faced daughter. She was wearing the same crumpled white dress, but her father had put on a loose-fitting shirt and bound his grey hair with a headband. They sat there like emanations of the wilderness. Nobody even glanced at them. But as the old man lumbered to his feet, the incongruity of his standing there, so rough-hewn and immobile, seemed to deplete him. His open-air majesty had dropped away. He looked rather helpless.