Turning Back the Sun(30)

He said, “I come because I think something not right when I in that place. You say, if you get to town, come see me.”

Rayner led him into his room, and the girl followed. The other patients” faces lifted in unison to watch them.

The old man sat down on the edge of the examination couch. The girl fidgeted beside him. Her movements were sudden and frightened. And now Rayner saw that her father was changed. He seemed no longer to control the bulk of flesh which enclosed him. His life had shrivelled inside it. Even his expression seemed to have withdrawn into his thicket of beard and locks, leaving little behind but a swarming nose and overcast eyes.

Rayner said: “What do you feel is wrong?”

The old man flexed his arm, testing it. “It went wrong back there, in that place, three days ago.” His look of puzzlement, the natives” knotting of nose and brows, seemed suddenly fitting. He gazed at Rayner. “I wake up with this feeling, like a ghost has been living in me. Yes, like that. Like somebody done something to me in the night while I”m sleeping. But there”s nobody been in that place for two days. Just me and my daughter.”

“What did it feel like?”

“Well, I get up thinking: who”s been here? Then I bend for my trousers and my fingers don”t take them. My arm is somewhere else, it”s left me. So I say to my daughter, pick up my trousers. I say that in my head, but my mouth doesn”t make words at all. See, I”ve lost my control. As if my body taken by some other feller. So I pick up the trousers with my other hand, and that”s okay. But when I try talk again the words come out wrong, like a baby. Yes, that”s how it is, like a baby.”

When Rayner examined him he found, as he expected, that his blood pressure was high; and on its left side the corrugations of his forehead had relaxed unnaturally, and a faint slackness released one corner of his mouth.

“You didn”t see yourself in a mirror after this?”

“Mirror?” A guttural laugh rocked the man”s shoulders. “What”d an old man have a mirror for? I given up looking at myself. I done with all that.”

“Did you have trouble eating?”

“The girl says the food come out of my mouth. Yes, I find it in my beard. But not anymore. Is okay now.” “What about your eyes?”

“Eyes, they”re hard to shut at first.” He dug his fingers into their lids. “When we started out to town, everything worse than now. But it gets better with walking.”

“How long were you walking?”

“Two days.”

Rayner thought: then he”s still strong, he may carry on for a few years.

The old man settled his look of puzzlement on him, but with an unfocused gaze, as if he descried some figure on a skyline deep in Rayner”s skull. “So what is this thing? Is it one of those that come back?”

“You”ve had a mild stroke.” Rayner watched the man”s face, but it yielded nothing. “It means you”ve got to be careful or it could come back.” But he wondered what to advise. The old man”s diet was already almost free of salts and animal fats, and in any case, little in his way of living would change now. “I”ll give you some tablets.”

He made up a packet of bromide, but knew that it was little more than a placebo. “Take one tablet every day. It”ll make your body calmer.”

The man took them in his oddly delicate hands, then passed them to his daughter.

Rayner asked, “You”ll remember?”

The old man did not answer. He seemed to have forgotten, or dismissed, the tablets. Instead he flexed his left arm again. “What about this? Is not like before. My grip still gone a bit.”

“That may get better. Don”t stop using it.”

The girl held the bromide in front of her, like a trophy. Her father got to his feet. He quivered faintly all through his frame. When he went to the door his gait was stiffly frail, but Rayner remembered it had been like that before.

“Where will you go now?”

They turned in the doorway, side by side. They resembled a primitive icon, he thought: their faces both unreadable. Like all the savages, they seemed at once contented and melancholy. This was their mystery to him. He repeated, “Where will you go now? Have you relatives anywhere?”

“Relatives all too far from here, I reckon,” the old man said. “My father come from Piat country but his people they all left. I not been in that country for long time. That”s all Mingala now.”

But to Rayner these names and boundaries were all meaningless. He and the native lived on different maps. To the old man the few towns and linked roads were incidental to the flux and ebb of herdsmen over the grasslands.

Rayner asked, “Can you come back and see me? Can you get transport from that place?”

“We go somewhere else,” the man said. “Water not so good in that place. I reckon it won”t last.”

“Can you come back here in a few days?”

“We come back.” But the old man said it without conviction, like a formula. Then he turned his back heavily in the doorway and his daughter followed him out, still carrying the tablets in front of her.

Rayner heard them walk through the waiting room, and into the street. He felt relief at their going—things were difficult enough here as it was—followed by self-disgust. If they”d been townspeople, he thought, he would have kept the man under observation for three or four weeks, checking his blood pressure and the taking of his pills. As it was, father and daughter would disappear back into the wilderness, where he would perhaps die.