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He threaded the reels more nervously now, unsure what they would resurrect. The subjects of old snapshots seemed to occupy a time irretrievably vanished; but in these cine films people moved unnervingly in the present. As they flickered into life, he found himself gazing back at a once-familiar past – his childhood home – that had yet turned strange. Those who were once old to him had grown magically younger, far younger than he was now. But as if he were seeing them bifocally, they harboured like a memory trace his early perspective. His father on the screen was barely fifty, yet sealed in his son's memory now, impregnably senior. The woman walking among the fruit trees in the garden seemed vivid and girlish, but she carried the mother's power of his remembrance.
Several film strips snapped inside the projector, or their sprocket holes tore and they jammed around its gate, where the lamp's heat blistered them within seconds. Each time this happened he was touched by momentary panic. He had not viewed these pictures for decades, but now the loss of a few frames produced an incommensurate sadness. Each cassette seemed to enclose its own time capsule, where people continued in a bright-lit parallel existence. Yet like the light departed from a dead star, the life they projected was an illusion from years ago. And their celluloid inhabitants – loved or forgotten – were bitterly mortal. Their world could be destroyed by a pittance of glue, and each breakage was like a death. He noticed how his hands trembled as he repaired them, scraping away the emulsion to hold their cement: hands that he remembered as a child in old men, wondering at the corded delta of their veins, their liver spots, and had at once been repelled and fascinated by what could never, surely, come to him.
For half a minute the camera panned across parched scrubland. In a settlement like an improvised village, a woman is sitting on a rough bench. He feels the hard sun again, the smell of dust, and torpor. It is hard to look at her now. She no longer exists in the context of the refugee camp, alongside others less than herself. She is alone, on his screen, gazing back at him. His throat has gone dry. She does not smile. Maybe it is not the custom (he cannot remember). Her face is young now, of course, although she was older than him. She looks shy and unexpectant. Her black skin is lighter than he remembers, the illusion of dark silk. She remains perfectly still (she does not understand the cinecamera) so that his film has the stasis of a portrait. It carries with it the bitter pathos of something long ago. Aeons, lives, ago. He whispers: 'Forgive me . . .' She goes on staring.
In the cramped studio the smell of burning has intensified. He thinks it comes from the projector now, and switches it off. Then he remembers the Quadrantid meteors predicted after midnight. He climbs the staircase to the rooftop, where their fire is falling from the sky.
From the book: Night of Fire by Colin Thubron. Copyright © 2017 by Colin Thubron. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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