Turning Back the Sun(48)

But when she stared at him now, her eyes were brilliant and afflicting, so that he kissed away the accusation he imagined there, to close them. For an intense moment he lay motionless in her warmth, not wanting to end, and for long afterwards they stayed intertwined. But instead of tiredness he felt an inarticulate confusion. He became neurotically aware of the panting of the fans overhead, and of the dogs moaning in the suburbs. There was no trace of light in the room, and it was only by the closeness of Zo?”s breast against his that he detected her silent, internal sobbing, and realized that her face was plunged beneath his into the pillow.

But later, while he lay awake, she fell asleep. Her breathing turned quiet, and his lips against her cheek found no new tears.





CHAPTER

21

As the last bungalow lurched past his window, and the train moved north over deserted cattlelands toward the hills, Rayner was filled with relief. He watched the black streamer of the smelter stack fade beyond the engine”s bluer smoke; and as the railroad track elongated and thinned over the plain, the vast, complex burden of the town seemed to loosen and slip physically away from him. Leaning from his empty carriage, he saw the last vestiges of habitation disappear: ghostly ranches and breached fencing. There was no sign of any savages. There was no sign of life at all. All the town”s brutalizing turmoil, its hordes of semi-exiles with their laden pasts, their paranoia, were dropping away like an aching memory below the horizon.

At last he sat back and watched the wilderness passing across his window. Nothing moved in it. Over whole regions an immunizing sweep of fires had charred the earth to a fine dust, and stripped and tilted the trees. To Rayner this forbidding land seemed to isolate his own past back in the town, and prevent it from following him. He took off his sweat-stained shirt and hung it in the window. As the hills lifted round the track, and the train labored up between them, he felt as if all his imperfect adulthood, its half-loves and compromises, was dying behind him in that blighted country. Now, looking back on the plains, he could not glimpse the town at all, only a burnished waste where dead rivers went.

Then, in spite of himself, his head filled with Zo?. Imagined somewhere in the plain behind him, she suddenly seemed so localized and confined, and so far away, that he suppressed her with a choking sadness. He resented her for intruding on his elation. He waited for her face to leave him. But it did not.

The train had only four passenger coaches. For the rest, he”d noticed, its trucks were heaped with funereal-looking silver-lead ingots from the mines, and slushy piles of zinc concentrate. For hours the engine heaved these into the mountains with slackening gasps, and sometimes came almost to a standstill. Treeless palisades of rock circled the track, and long valleys were hectic with scree and streams.

At nightfall Rayner stretched across his bunk in the suddenly cool air, knowing that dawn would find him less than three hours from the capital. The train roared and whistled in the dark. For all he knew he was lying in the same bed as fifteen years before, when he had journeyed into exile, sobbing because of Miriam—until the soldier in the bunk above had bellowed at him to shut up.

Now, staring up at the grimed ceiling, dulled by the drone and shudder of the wheels, he was stricken by the idea not that the capital had changed—fifteen years wasn”t long in the life of a city—but that his memory had fatally enhanced it. Nothing, surely, was ever as you remembered it. He must have forgotten a great procession of ordinariness and squalor. Even his photographs, which recorded a city anointed in sunlight, were of course selective. He felt faintly sick. The streets and houses of his youth could not have survived as he imagined them. Lying sleepless for another hour, the wheels thundering in his head, he felt his misgiving slide gradually into blackness, until he conceived that all the remembered grace and gentleness of the capital might have belonged only to the sheltered childhood which he could never reenter.

Yet his memories were too few. People leapt and vanished in them like dolphins. Where, for instance, was the waif-like Anna who gave him the crystal he”d laid on the altar? And Uncle Bernard of the colored handkerchiefs? And when he thought of his old gang—Leon, Jarmila and the others—he knew he had lost contact with all of them, and experienced a vague unease. For in their different ways, they must have flourished more than he had.

He imagined them, for some reason, as refinements of their younger selves: Jarmila and Adelina with their blonde hair now fashionably short, married to affluent government officials. Gerhard, his youthful handsomeness matured, would himself be such an official, and Leon a successful but reclusive painter. And as for Miriam …

It must have been the engine smoke blowing through the carriage window in the early morning which made Rayner dream of the fire. The hands clutching the sheet at his chest became those of a five-year-old child. He watched his mother burst through the door and stand staring at him again, but he saw her more clearly than he had in life. The gauzy smoke had thinned from round her, so that her soot-smeared face smiled from an evaporated halo. But this time she did not come to him. Her hands were behind her back, as if tied. He woke up coughing from the smoke, and realized that the sun was up and glinting in his eyes.

The country outside had changed to scrubland and orchards. The train stopped at little torpid towns where half the men looked decrepit, and the women were out of sight. A few farmers clambered on board in wide-brimmed hats and shorts, lugging old-fashioned travelling cases labelled Slezak or Larsen or Bollack. They had sun-blistered legs and arms. Sometimes they disembarked enigmatically at villages of miners or rail-workers: white bungalows clean on their stilts around wide, single streets.