Turning Back the Sun(39)

He asked the native, “Have you killed a man?”

“I never had no reason.” The old face remained impassive. “But some blokes I used to know, in the old days, they killed two, three fellers before dying.”

“Why?”

“Well, that was the custom, you know. He killed one of you, and you killed him. Fellers in those days didn”t kill for land or stock. They killed for revenge, eh, for dead men. But I don”t hold with that. Those ways gone.”

In the doorway behind them the girl appeared with a fresh-made cake in either hand. She darted forward to offer them, then sat down on the far side of her father and stared at the grass.

Rayner asked, “Is she happy?” But as he looked at her, the concept of happiness seemed irrelevant.

The old man said, “She”ll be happy when we find our people. We been too long single.”

“You could leave in two or three days.”

The man said something to the girl and she answered back not in the shy tones which Rayner always expected, but in her harsh gabble.

The native laughed. “She says you”re a good man. You make her old father well again.”

“Remind her she must keep you well,” Rayner said. “Tell you to take tablets.” He looked at her enigmatic profile. “She”s a fine girl.”

The old man said, “You like her?”

“You”re lucky to have her.”

The native laughed again, comfortably, as if at something warm inside him.

Rayner asked, “How far is it back to your people?”

“I not sure.” His chest heaved under its shirt. “Maybe ten days, maybe fifteen. Our people too much scattered, they go out and live one there, one here, the young blokes.” He inscribed a circle in the dust in front of him. “But the old fellers come back and die in their birth country.”

Rayner envied the man”s freedom. In this nation, only the nomads moved about at will. If Rayner tried to return to his birthplace, he would meet a bureaucratic wall; but this man had only to walk. Rayner looked at the wavering circle which the native had drawn in the earth. It seemed a very natural journey. He asked, “Where do your people go after they die?”

The old man answered at once, “Some say you go into the ground, that you just rot there, and your life done. But others say you climb up the sky, back out of time.” He spoke as if both prospects were equal to him. “I heard your white missionaries say that too, that some fellers sit underneath in the soil, other fellers sit above in the sky. It”s the same with us.” He leaned forward and smoothed away the circle in the dust with the palm of one hand. The girl watched him, as if this were in some way important. “But I reckon maybe there”s no way back into the sky, that since the tree got cut we stay down here.”

Rayner remembered the rock paintings, in which a symbolic tree had separated the fluid figures from the static ones. But the photographs which he had taken of them had turned out wan. The camera seemed to have registered the painted scarp just as he first had: an empty wall of rock. But when he showed the photographs to the native, the man”s finger wavered across their surfaces in amazement and recognition. “This the same place all right.”

In fascination Rayner tried again to pin down its story. Was this some inner landscape? Were the graceful figures the natives” ideal of themselves?

But no, said the old man. “This just our life as it is, as it was.”

So their beauty was only an artist”s convention, Rayner realized, mixed with the passage of time. “And the tree?” He could barely discern it in the photograph; even on the living scarp, he remembered, it had been little more than a meander of faded white. “The tree led into the sky?”

“That was in the old days,” the old man said. “The sky was lower then.”

Dimly Rayner could discern the white divide in the photograph—and on its far side the region where the fluid figures turned plump and stationary. The old man”s head sank onto his chest in a pillow of beard. “Those ones belong before time.” He was growing tired, or perhaps reluctant. “When the tree cut down, then time began.”

So the felling of the tree was the event which exiled earth from heaven: the start of mortality. Rayner asked, “Might it grow again?”

“Some fellers think maybe,” the native said. “And you can still see that place out there, the navel of the earth.” His hand lifted in the direction of the wilderness. “Maybe one day the tree grow back.”

Rayner remembered the blighted stump which the old man had drawn him in the dust when they first met. “How?”

But the man”s head returned to nestle on his chest. He did not answer. Rayner had asked too many questions, he realized. Unwittingly he may even have probed the man about his own survival beyond death. The tree, after all, had been the avenue to paradise. Yet the man seemed to regard the future with a dispassionate familiarity. Perhaps he was one of those who believed that the dead simply pass into the earth.

When Zo? met Rayner at the door next evening, she was holding a suitcase, and the cat was mewling round her ankles. She said, “I”m going to the flat to sleep. I”m washed out.”

“Aren”t you dancing?”

“I told them I can”t tonight. The place is half empty anyhow.”