Turning Back the Sun(5)

“It would be more rational.” Ivar spoke with neither rancor nor regret. “Because they can”t adapt. If a species fails to adapt, it dies.”

Rayner thought: no, they can”t adapt. That is what”s fascinating about them. He remembered their night fires along the river, the unintelligible words of their chanting. “I don”t know anything about them,” he said.

“The evidence is that war is a religion with them. Their idol is a kind of war god.”

“How did you hear that?”

“The older settlers had it from missionaries. That”s why the missionaries never made any headway, they say. The savages had their own god already. They never understood Christianity. They got confused by the Trinity.”

Rayner said harshly, “So do I.”

Ivar smiled into his brandy. The music almost dinned out the words. “You always were a pighead. I remember that.”

“Do you?” Rayner did not remember it.

“You always got in a hell of a passion about things, then walked away into your own world and forgot. Do you remember the time we planned …”

Occasionally, as now, something Ivar said shocked Rayner into memory, and he”d think: so I can”t have changed much after all. He asked caustically, “Where”s this idol meant to be, then? Out in the middle of nowhere?”

“Not exactly.” Ivar became suddenly discreet. Rayner had the impression that he”d put on his uniform. “It”s on our maps.”

Even as a boy, Ivar had been impressive, Rayner remembered. He”d been expert at the disclosure or withholding of information. Information, even then, was power. He”d always known which teachers to manipulate, how to get cheap cigarettes, the best crib-sheets.

“So you”re preparing to round them up.”

“You can”t usually find them. If you hunt them, they just dissolve …”

But a pair of woman”s arms had arrived round Ivar”s neck. She was tall, with cornflower eyes and a small head misted in maize-colored hair. She was the reason Ivar had come. Her eyes wandered over Rayner. “I”m Felicie,” she said. “My father owns this place.” He felt her assessing him: money, age, sexuality … but she did so with a distrait candor, and he realized he was smiling at her. “This is Zo?,” she said. “I sing. She”s a dancer.”

She settled by Ivar on his right, while Zo?—a silent, fiercely made-up girl—sat by Rayner but looked in the other direction. They were not the prostitutes Rayner had expected. He was unsure what they were. They were not even typical artistes. Felicie talked in a rapid, lost voice with her arms circled round Ivar. Was it true what she”d heard about the savages, she asked? Might they attack the town? Perhaps by night …

Ivar drank his brandy between her locked arms. Nothing was true, he said.

She released him petulantly. “God, I hate this town. And now we”re going to be murdered in it.”

“You can be murdered anywhere.”

“But it gets more violent every year. And it”s so boring. Give me the capital any day. God, I love the capital!” But she spoke as if it didn”t matter. Hating this or loving that was a pastime. She looked vaguely, perpetually out of focus, Rayner thought. She reached over and shook Zo?”s arm. “Did you see the latest? Scoop-back gowns are back in fashion. In the capital …”

But Zo? did not answer, and Felicie focused suddenly on Rayner. “I haven”t seen you around before. Are you from the capital?”

“Years ago,” Rayner said. He suppressed the ruefulness in his voice. “Fifteen years.” But he did not want to discuss it with her.

Felicie murmured, “Fifteen years.” She stroked Ivar”s cheek, while he kissed her lips, so that Rayner turned to Zo? and asked woodenly, “What kind of dancing do you do?”

She looked at him for the first time. Compared with Felicie, she seemed perfectly, violently concentrated: a too-immaculate face, browned and powdered and lit by glittering pale-blue eyes, which repelled enquiry. Her hair was seized back like a ballerina”s and knotted in a shining scallop behind. “The dancing”s a mixture,” she said. “Jazz, flamenco, ballet …”

He noticed how her fingers wrenched at one another. He had thought her bored or preoccupied, but instead she was nervous. She added with a trace of defiance, “I compose my own dances.”

Rayner guessed her dances would be conventional, whereas Felicie, who under her manicured pallor seemed to be screaming, would sing in a way he could not predict.

She stood up shakily and took Zo?”s hand. “We”re performing in a minute,” she said. Odd, Rayner thought, how Felicie seemed to exist underwater, her hair adrift and her movements all strengthless. She kissed Ivar”s neck and smiled at Rayner. She had the kind of loose, mobile mouth which he found attractive.

The curtains parted before a small stage with a backdrop of mirrors and hanging strips of silver. The tables were starting to fill up with youths who had come in from late-night bars or from one of the licensed brothels. Shouts of, “Where”s the strippers?” went up, and “Get on with it!”

But the revue had been programmed to titillate. The first to take the stage was a middle-aged acrobat who suspended himself lugubriously between aluminum poles. Then came a skinny contortionist, who twined around herself so effortlessly that Rayner stopped being surprised at anything she did. Yet this furtive venue—the plush, converted cellar with its blue spotlights and recorded cymbals and drums—lent to these acts a hint of the forbidden. If they”d been performed in one of the town squares, he thought, they would have gone almost ignored. But here, in the theater of secrecy, in the dramatized dark, people paid to watch, and were waiting. Their heads clustered black along the tables nearest the stage. Their camaraderie had dwindled to crude expectation.