Turning Back the Sun(32)
CHAPTER
14
The town”s fear was heightened by a sense that the wilderness was closing in on it. By August a haze of bush fires hovered across every horizon, and blurred the circle of the sun. The savages, it was said, were systematically setting fire to the scrublands, and the tinder-dry shrubs and grasses ignited at the fall of a cigarette or a broken bottle. Smoke half obscured the northern hills, rolling like cannon fire between their clefts, and the town streets, even the house interiors, were pervaded by the faint miasma of burning.
Without a newspaper or radio station of its own, the town floated on a groundswell of hearsay. The two national journals (which arrived a day late) printed articles whose brevity and plainness illuminated nothing. But everyone could see that the drift of farmers into the streets had swelled. Some of them still trucked out to their fields or herds during the day, and returned at sunset. But others had abandoned their ranches altogether, and set up in boarding houses or slept in the alleys on their horse-drawn carts, sprawled among the flotsam of their possessions. They were dour people, with sun-bleached hair and reddened hands. They did not look as if they would frighten easily. Almost all told tales of armed native bands and pilfered stock, or knew of some farmstead which had been attacked. But they had lived in isolation; their news was as fragmentary and filled with rumor and contradiction as the town”s. Yet they seemed to accept the drought and savages with fatalism, whereas the townsmen, who had suffered less, were by turns panicky and outraged, and were demanding revenge.
Many of the farmers whom Rayner used to telegraph in the wilds now came to him from the streets. His clinic was already brimming with patients whose ailments were nervous or unspecific, and the hospital engulfed him half the afternoon in minor operations for an upsurge of accidents due to alcohol and heatstroke. Two babies in the hospital died of diphtheria. The humidity did not let up. The fans whispering under the surgery ceilings only redistributed the heat, and evening brought no touch of wind. The air banked up round the town in a wall of smoke and dust, and people began to feel that the seasons had stopped. After the sultry nights, everyone woke exhausted. Rayner slept only fitfully even when not on call.
Whenever he visited the old native, whose blood pressure remained erratic, he saw himself a traitor in the town”s eyes. As he approached the copse where they were camped, he always hoped to find them gone. Yet he knew that the man was in no state to move.
“Who are these people?” Zo? demanded. “Aren”t they frightened?”
But the situation in the town seemed to stimulate her, as if she were at last witnessing something meaningful. She reported every rumor and incident. The nightclub closed earlier now, and she insisted on walking back alone through the near-silent streets, whose only danger, she said, lay in the drunken calls of the farmers from their wagons.
Then one night she returned tense with indignation. The half-caste dancer in the cabaret had suddenly disappeared, dismissed overnight by Felicie”s father. He”d called the rest of the artistes together and explained that customers were commenting on the girl. It was bad for the club”s reputation. You couldn”t employ the enemy …
“Enemy! She was just a dancer.”
During the next few days Rayner noticed the last of the natives vanished from the town center. Even the man who tended the plants in the mall was taken for questioning, and the girl on Nielsen”s Baked Potato van disappeared one evening, and never returned. When Rayner enquired after them, people”s fear surfaced in near-paranoia. There was no such thing as a civilized native, they said. “Those people” always reverted to type.
The detection of half-castes had now become an ugly game. The darker-skinned townspeople fell under early suspicion, and people claimed to discern even in Italian and Syrian immigrants the savages” triple frown or the lines ploughing down from the bridge of the nose to the mouth”s corners. You could tell “them,” people said, by their distinctive stance with their knees braced back, and by the way they walked on the balls of their feet, as if sneaking up on you.
Medical helplessness in the face of the disease was changing people”s perception of the doctors. They were suddenly seen as fallible. A cloud of disillusion brewed up, and an indefinable resentment. Rayner realized, too, that people were talking more personally about him. He was what the military termed an “unreliable element.” Even the medical officer, his half-skilled analyst, had alluded to it. The story had spread that he had treated savages out of the bush, increasing the risk of infection, and had settled two of them in the parklands near the clinic. During his surgery Rayner sensed that even the older patients were troubled with him, although they said nothing.
It was Leszek—tremulous and brittle with pride—who broached the subject. “Do you suppose that old man may be well enough to leave soon? It cannot be very safe for him now …” Even in this weather Leszek wore a linen jacket and tie, his white hair fastidiously smoothed back. But he looked stressed and pale.
Rayner said, “His blood pressure”s still too high.”
“I”ve never had to treat any of the savages,” Leszek said wanly, “but they suffer from high blood pressure a lot, I”ve heard.”
Rayner knew what Leszek wanted. In his partner”s face he saw the ghosts of the past assembling: fear of authority and of the community”s hatred, the exile he never spoke about. Leszek”s lips pursed primly, as if in self-judgement. Pride and fear were at odds in him.