Turning Back the Sun(37)
She showed them the kitchen. The girl stood behind her father, uncomprehending. But the man said, “I remember these things from the cattle station days. I work these things okay, I explain to the girl.”
“But you tell us what you eat,” Zo? said. “We”ll buy the food.”
“Is okay for now. We got the flour. Some fruit. Whitefeller stuff make harder eating for us.”
The moment they entered the bedroom they went to the window and looked out into the dark of the garden. They murmured together. The trees seemed to comfort them. When the old man turned, he picked experimentally at the coverlets, the curtains, the cushions, but said nothing. His daughter did not seem to see them.
“If you go out,” Rayner said, “don”t go beyond the trees.”
The girl spread their quilt on the floor and squatted down. From her cord bag she drew out a long dish packed with tubers, two little bark spoons and a bone knife. Rayner watched her in fascination. She might have been alone. He had the impression that because for thousands of years her people had experienced only the wilderness and one another, a white face scarcely registered with her, and did not meaningfully exist. After a minute he and Zo? realized not that their own presence was intrusive but that they were simply no longer being seen, and they closed the door softly behind them.
But late that night Rayner was woken by something. He eased out of bed without disturbing Zo?. He heard the stutter of a distant motor, then nothing. As he parted the curtains and stared down at the river, he made out the dimmed lights of an army patrol among the trees. They went in utter silence, furtively. He watched as their lamps rose diagonally up the slope and passed before the house without a sound. Then they dwindled along the crest of the ridge toward the bloodwood copse. As he gazed, they vanished and reemerged where the slope met the skyline, then one by one they disappeared.
During the following week the natives were so quiet in the house that Rayner often forgot they were there. All day, with scarcely a change of posture, they would rest on their haunches in the grass outside the back door, facing the trees. Sometimes the old man would doze off like this, bolt upright, his eyebrows descended like pelmets almost onto his cheeks. Occasionally Rayner would find him smoking hemp leaves in a little bamboo pipe, perforated like a flute. At first he moved to stop this, then let him dream in peace.
Meanwhile the girl squatted beside her father, weaving a basket out of pandanus fiber, or simply sat idle with her head faintly inclined to his. She never used the kitchen. Instead she built a cooking fire just inside the door. Neither she nor her father questioned the circular hole it burnt in the rug, but pulled their seed-cakes from its embers and sometimes offered Rayner a sweet fruit paste which they blended over its flames. In their room the beds and chairs were ignored, and they never touched an electric switch. Every dusk they unrolled their soiled quilt over the floor and slept back to back with their hair flared out around headrests improvised from the garden stones.
Yet they slept fitfully. Through the villa”s papery walls Rayner heard their sudden words and cries. It was as if the stress which they denied by day was experienced in their dreams. Sometimes he felt it was in dreams that their real lives were lived, and that in daytime they merely waited.
The old man grew visibly robuster in these first few days, and even the girl began woodenly to acknowledge her surroundings. Whenever Rayner saw her she smiled at him, but the smile was superposed on her face: she had copied it from her father. It flashed on and off. And when their eyes met, her gaze no longer dropped, but held Rayner”s in a blank, unfathomable stare: just a pair of eyes, looking.
Rayner felt a premature sadness for her, because she might soon be alone, but his pity was impaired by her enigma, by the apparent absence of any person in her, and besides, she was not a girl any longer but a young woman. She had the long, veined feet and hands of her people, already refined, and her breasts pushed against the white dress. She knew no language but her own, yet Zo? befriended her with chatter—”She must understand something”—and brought her different fruits and cakes, which were sometimes eaten and sometimes set aside.
Only the presence of the cat altered her expression. Then the knot of native unease flickered between her eyes, and when Zo? held the creature out to her she darted back in dismay. She did not understand what the cat was for. As Zo? fondled it, smoothing the paws against her own neck, the girl watched in wonderment, as if the cat and the white woman had a secret pact together.
On the second day Zo? heard a scream from her bedroom. She looked in and saw the girl sitting in front of the dressing table with her hands lifted to her head. She had discovered herself in the mirror. Until today she had used only a square of tin in which to glimpse her face, but now she was confronted by the brilliant, life-size woman who lived in reflection. She stared at her, awestruck. She steered her head from side to side, and pattered her fingertips over her cheeks. At last she realized that the woman would not suddenly do something on her own. Then, slowly, she unbuttoned the top of the torn dress, slipped it down from her shoulders and gazed at her reflected breasts. She laughed.
Now that in the town”s eyes the two natives had drifted from Rayner”s protection and back into the wilderness, he felt that people”s stares were no longer on him (but perhaps they never had been). Yet the natives” presence in the house confirmed how little he understood them. They were not only different from the town”s conception of its enemy, and from the axe-men of his own fear, but they were different from one another. The old man”s years of stock breeding had touched him with the white man”s world. But the girl was a repository of her people”s mystery. She existed free of any values he knew.