“You”ll be well enough to go before anything changes.”
“I feel better than a long time now.”
They sat silent for a minute in the stifling shade of the trees. Then Rayner asked, “The people here say the armed bands upriver are fifty or sixty strong now. You think that”s true? What are they planning?”
“Maybe is true. Those fellows join together if they get scared. But those aren”t my people and I don”t know. That”s hard territory up there, water holes all empty in a bad year. That country dry out people in the head, and then they go killing.”
“Could they attack the town?”
“Those big groups not for fighting, I reckon. There”s too many older fellows with them. Those bands just running scared. It”s the lone ones do the killing.” He lifted his finger. “Some of those blokes upriver gone bad singly, maybe, but they only kill a few folks.”
“They”ve killed eleven.”
The old man considered this in silence. His screwed-up
eyes and forehead had retracted into a charred immobility. All his life seemed concentrated in the fleshy mouth, which moved in its beard like an independent oracle. “Eleven not so many. Whitefellers”ll come back and get those farms again.”
“The farms will be the same,” Rayner said. “But you can”t bring the dead people back.”
“People change,” the old man said. “In twenty, forty years people all dead anyway, and lying in separate graves. Me too.” He laughed. “My life done now.”
Rayner revolted against his words, but could find nothing to say. As he stared into the native”s cinder-colored face, this acceptance of death no longer seemed the superstition which the whites claimed, but the knowledge of a people coeval with all this violent, ancient land—a people to whom death was only the flow of time and of the clan. That, perhaps, accounted for their stasis, their sometime indifference to killing. It made Rayner feel naïve. He could not share in it. He could only share the townspeople”s outrage.
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 Zoë 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.”
He heard alarm in his voice. “What”s wrong?”
Her recurring need to be alone had always taken other forms than this; he would sense it in the self-contained way in which she moved about the house, with averted head. But her turning away tonight was tinged by petulance and accusation. In the oppressive heat, tiny bulbs of sweat glistened along her hairline, and she kept touching her knuckles against her eyes.
“I”m just tired,” she said. “I”ve got period pains.”
He offered to drive her to her flat, but knew she would refuse. Then she said, “I wish you hadn”t been so superior with Felicie.”
He repeated irritably, “Superior?”
“She”s distraught about the club. It”s becoming a desert, and she said you looked
pleased.”
“I wasn”t pleased.”
“You told her I could always do another job.” She stooped down and gathered up the cat. “But I don”t
want
any other job.”
Then Rayner realized what had angered her: he had belittled her vocation. And as she walked away down the
road, with the cat glaring over her shoulder, she was flaunting her independence because she felt he had discounted it. He wondered, too, if the presence of the natives was starting to oppress her. Not that they imposed themselves—they were eerily quiet—but both Zoë and he had felt recently that the house was being watched.
They squatted outside the back door, as usual, in the sultry shadows. But the girl had changed. She sat very upright and still, with her hands spread in her lap. Across her forehead dangled a string of little green stones, and two circles of corkwood dye opened up her eyes into a black stare. When she shot her meaningless smile at him, the effect was of a portrait”s canvas splitting. It brought a shock of emptiness.
Rayner sat beside the old man and took his blood pressure, which had been stable for a week now. “In two days you”ll be able to go.” But as he scrutinized the encircling trees, his relief was followed by a nagging disquiet. Anybody scaling the fence and parting the foliage might see the natives here. He said, “You haven”t noticed anybody watching?”
“My eyes not so good now.” The old man turned to the girl. “But her eyes young, and she seen nothing.” He continued looking at her, while her painted gaze stayed fixed on her lap.
Rayner supposed he should remark on her, but her impact was unsettling. He said formally, “She”s looking pretty.”
The girl glanced at him, as though she understood. Then she and her father conversed together, he in a growling, sibilant flow, she in her abrupt jabber. They might have been speaking separate languages. The old man tapped Rayner”s forearm; it was the first time he had voluntarily touched him. “She says she”s glad you like her.”
Rayner imagined this a native courtesy—and soon the girl got up and went into the villa. Behind them the sun had dropped like a red millstone into the mountains separating
the town from the west. For the first time in weeks a shudder of wind arose, then stilled, and three bats came whispering out of the trees. Over the sky, too hazed and light for stars, the violet air was disappearing into indigo, and a trail of birds crossed out of the wilderness.
Then a small cry sounded from the house, and the old man said to Rayner, “The girl want you to go in to her.”
Rayner did not believe that this was what he imagined. “What does she want?”
But the native only repeated, “She wants you to go to her.” His expression was lost under its blue-black skin.
Rayner got up, mystified. He went past the cooled fire in the annex and entered the room. In a corner glowed two rush candles. The girl had taken off her headband and was combing out her hair with a wooden comb. As she turned her stare on him, the loosened hair fell short and thick round her face. For a moment she stood looking at him. Then her hands lifted to her shoulders and she matter-of-factly eased the white dress down her arms and dropped it to the floor.
Their misunderstanding was complete.
Momentarily her body, backlit by the candlelight, was visible only in silhouette, but Rayner felt a rush of anguish at her humiliation. He took the two steps to her and began, “Look …” He was about to tell her she was pretty, but that he could not touch her. He had forgotten that they knew no word of one another”s language. His hand came up and held her shoulders, and he tried to look into her face. But she gazed back unfathomably. He had thought of her as a girl, but of course she was a woman. He supposed she had made herself pretty for him. She was wearing only a plaited cane armlet, and she smelled of sandalwood grease.
Her body was now fully lit in the weak light. It was lissome and coppery. Her young breasts brushed against his wrists. Her closeness had become unbearable. His fingers were kneading her shoulders, despite himself. He had an
idea that by this—their only common language—he was telling her that he admired her, but would not sleep with her. But she just stared through her black-circled eyes, waiting for him to begin, while his desire and his torment at her innocence mounted.
It was as if only her movements—fleet and sudden—expressed her. She darted to the bed and lay on it, her legs a little apart, her face tilted at the ceiling. The shift of light woke a glistening patina over her skin. He could not tell if she wanted him at all. Perhaps her father had persuaded her to it. Was it an act of gratitude, some kind of repayment? He had no idea.
But even on the bed she looked darkly natural: a barbarian body which clothes had insulted. He stooped over her, shaking his head—but even this sign language was unknown to her. His unbuttoned shirt dangled above her breasts. His need had become a torture. He heard himself say, “You”re beautiful.” But she stayed inert. Only the savage”s perennial knot of puzzlement was exacerbated by the candlelight.
Then he straightened beside her. She was not beautiful, or ugly, or anything he understood. He might only turn her into whatever he wanted her to be, his own untruthfulness. As for the girl herself, she was merely waiting for sex. It was perhaps something simple to her, uncorrupted by love. And he was as much a mystery to her as she to him, so that suddenly he saw himself in her eyes: a white anomaly whose head was oscillating inexplicably.
He stood up in the hot room and went to the door. Behind him the girl ran across to her dress. When Rayner reached the garden he was surprised that night had not come. But only a few minutes had passed. The same three bats were flickering overhead, and the old native”s posture had not altered. Rayner said gently to him, “Tell the girl she”s very pretty, but that our customs are not the same.”
In the dark he could see no change in the old man”s face.
T
he people imagined the town ringed in a circle of fire. The distant conflagrations blurred every skyline in grey-blue smoke, and tinged with ash the perennial dust which seeped in from the desert. It was impossible to tell how much the suffocating heat arose from the surrounding fires and how much from the unchanging sun. By day the air waited like a physical load to be shouldered or penetrated. At night you could see the flames glinting among the foothills or far out in the wilderness, like the camp fires of an army.
Almost nobody ventured beyond the town”s confines anymore, except with a military escort. Rumors spread of war parties one or two hundred strong, looming and shifting behind the smoke curtains. Where each main street dwindled into the wilderness, the army had set up an earth redoubt mounted with a machine gun. These were tactically useless, since the suburbs could be penetrated from anywhere, and were meant simply to reassure. But in the end they only deepened people”s sense of siege and quickened the creeping terror that was slowly paralyzing all the town”s arteries.
But when Rayner was ordered out again on army secondment, he found a confusion of evidence. Some farmsteads had been looted so thoroughly that even their timbers and steel fittings had vanished; others had been gutted by bush fires. But many stood strangely untouched. Poultry still strutted in their abandoned yards, and their doors and windows swung open as at their panic-stricken abandonment, giving onto rooms where the crockery was neatly stacked and food decomposed on the tables.
People now became afraid that the railroad to the capital would be harassed, and their last link with civilization severed. Already the desertion of the farms had increased the town”s dependence on food railed in from the coast, and prices had soared. An upsurge of nighttime lootings was attributed to savage infiltration, but turned out—whenever uncovered—to be the crimes of hungry farmers and the exasperated poor.
Yet the municipality issued no new law and the military imposed no curfew. It was as if everybody knew what was expected, and obeyed rules against the savages more total than any that might have been issued. The municipal notice-boards were stuck with photographs of native atrocities—murdered farmers, pillaged ranches—and everyone assumed that savages would be turned in on sight. In early September a group of townspeople caught three unarmed natives prowling on the outskirts, and butchered them. Such was the mood of the town that their killers were cheered in the streets.
Among the town”s youth, too, an ugly force of auxiliaries had risen up—roving vigilantes in blue armbands, who patrolled the night streets armed with clubs. These days they were almost the only people to be met with after dark. The few others who ventured out often carried rifles—armed not only against the natives, but against the farmers whose wagons crowded the alleys two abreast.
In Rayner”s clinic the victims of the “savage disease”
were multiplying. Sometimes they came secretly, after surgery hours; and most would claim at first to be suffering from some other ailment. He grew to detect them by the vagueness of their declared symptoms, until in an outburst of nerves they would unbutton their blouses or shirts.
“What is it, doctor?”
Then they watched his face in terror. Compulsively they would run their fingers over the rash, but did so delicately, because it was raised a little from the surrounding skin and they were frightened it might spill over. The simpler or franker among them wondered aloud if they had contracted it from some native they had brushed against three, six, twelve months before.
Dutifully, to comfort them, Rayner would investigate these patients” rashes, their mouths” lining and eyeballs, and so simulate control. A few scientific definitions and prognoses temporarily quietened them, but he could administer only placebos, and the malaise accompanying the rash was often indistinguishable from the lassitude inflicted by the weather. In the end he might only treat their fear. The symptoms should abate when the humidity let up, he said; and the causes were under investigation. Even local foodstuffs were being analyzed. The disease was a mystery, he told them, but mysteries were sometimes benign. It betrayed no one”s personal history, carried no stigma.
But one morning a suicide was cut down from under the town bridge, tainted with the rash from neck to scrotum.
To Rayner the disease was like a warning. It was waiting, as if its victims had been marked out. And he wondered superstitiously about a common factor among them, as though, after all, they had been morally branded. But there was none.
He must be growing imbecile, he thought. This sultriness was turning everybody”s brain. Perhaps his sessions with the analyst were muddling him. Especially in the half-sleep of the nights, fragmented by dreams, his anxieties
mushroomed. He dreamed of Ivar. Ever since their schooldays Ivar had been in control of things. Now Rayner had slipped beyond his grasp, and Zoë too—Zoë was perhaps the only woman who had eluded him. Yet even at school there had been a price to pay for not joining Ivar. “Rayner won”t swear the vow! Let”s hunt him. We”ll hunt you, Rayner, if you don”t swear the vow.” The dream pattered with fear. Ivar wanted Zoë back. The Intelligence thundered on his door.
Awake in the dull pessimism of morning, Rayner knew that Ivar might plan a limited retribution. It would be nothing so feeling, so hurt, as revenge—that would be superfluous—just an appropriate measure to show where power lay. If the two natives were discovered here, Ivar might even have him imprisoned for a day or two, calculating to humiliate him before Zoë. In his blacker moments he suspected that only his knowledge of the major”s disease prevented his arrest.
One morning, under the trees by his villa gate, he came upon a litter of cigarette stubs. Somebody must have been standing there, chain-smoking, watching the house hour after hour.
The night before the natives were to leave, he went into the street and began to walk around the compound. Now that cars and passersby were so few, the antiphonal howling of the guard dogs filled the dark, and he could even hear the two-note bark of the desert owls. A single lamp shed an amber pool beside the road. The scrape of his lame foot jarred on the tarmac; then he turned along the barrier of his own fence and trees. They sent up a wall of darkness. He saw no one. A fit man could scale the fence, he knew. He scaled it easily himself. Inside his perimeter, the air was sick with frangipani blossom. But there was nobody. An upper window showed a curtained light, where Zoë had returned. Probably no one had been out for hours, and the natives were sleeping. He felt a
foolish absolution. Above his head shone smothered stars.
When he went indoors he found Zoë half undressed before the bedroom mirror. Her cat was reestablished on its cushion in one corner, and her open suitcase spelled forgiveness. She looked at him teasingly. “Where have you been?”
“I was checking to see if anybody was outside.” “Somebody was. He walked off as I arrived.” “That must have been me.”
She burst into laughter. “That”s ridiculous! I know your walk. This was a small man, on the far pavement.”
Rayner did not want to think about it. He kissed her mouth to stop it talking. But their eyes met in a moment of foreboding. He asked, “How was the club tonight?”
Zoë dismissed the menace with her sudden ebullience. “The club? Oh, you”d have
loved
it. There was
nobody
there! A few farmers and some bored vigilantes looked in early, but by the time I danced you could”ve heard a mouse yawn. You”d have been thrilled.”
Rayner said testily, “I
don”t
want the club to collapse.”
“No, not to collapse exactly”—she stepped mockingly up to him—”but just to
fold
very genteelly, so your girlfriend will be forced into a respectable job.”
“You”d never be forced into anything.” He held her away from him while his gaze travelled over her half-dressed body in a kind of penance. He was reminding himself of her again—a beauty more elusive than the native”s—and concentrating his desire, almost formally, on her whiteness. He drew her against him.
As he kissed her, his fingers spread behind her shoulders and touched an area of faint, upraised roughness. It was familiar from many other bodies.
She felt him start. Her eyes followed his stare. He crushed her against him again, clasping her head to his chest. But she pulled away and stared down.
Out of her left armpit, but stopping short of the
breast, crawled a thick crescent of chocolate. Slowly she lifted her arm. It curled beneath it, then broadened to an oval behind, lapping her shoulder blade.
She lowered her arm softly and looked at him. Her lips were tensed back from her teeth. But she only said, “Well, that”s it.”
She was chilled into calm. She did not want to be touched, he could tell. She just wanted to stand there, absorbing the knowledge of it, separate. But he began quaking inside. His voice, almost audible, pleaded in his head:
not her.
He said, “There”s no evidence it”s dangerous.” But he was saying it more to himself than to Zoë. They had discussed the disease often, as if it were something which only others would contract, and she had heard everything he knew. Somehow he had never imagined it touching her. She was so vibrantly healthy. Even the purity of her skin seemed to deny it. He wondered: how on earth hadn”t she noticed it? He held out his arms to her, but she turned her back. Then, realizing its splash on her shoulder blade, she swung round again and covered her armpit with one hand. She said, “It might be contagious.”
He saw the shame shaking her. The rash confirmed her ugliness in her own eyes. It was a natural eruption from the unsightliness deep in her, the inner blemish she believed in. She was challenging him to touch her.
He said, “Have you felt ill?”
“I thought it was my period pains. It”s nothing much.”
His hands alighted on her waist, then gently, consciously, slid up to caress her under her shoulders. He wanted to kiss the rash, to involve his fate in hers, in spite of everything. But she suddenly lifted her arms in an impertinent dance. She cried almost angrily, “Christ, what”s the fuss about? Nobody”s died of this damn thing, have they?” She peered at it over her shoulder. “And I can cover it up when I dance.” She made light of it with a harsh, impetuous gaiety. “I expect I”m in the majority by
now! We”ll all have it in a minute. Why haven”t you got it? It”ll be the town”s trademark! People who don”t have it will be considered ill …”
But later that night Rayner fell victim to the panic of his most ignorant patients, wondering about her over and over, lying awake through silence in a sweat of apprehension.