Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  Gaby suddenly cut out a dress for her; there were fittings with Rosa standing on the terrace table, waving to acquaintances who happened to look up and see her aloft, and the children of neighbours, curious and shy. The equidistant sea and sky were divided for her by the line of gravity like an hour-glass, through which a ship wrapped in pink-mauve haze passed from one element to the other, coming down over the horizon. Gaby and Katya pinned and tacked; while Rosa recognized the car-ferry boat from Corsica or Sardinia Bernard identified when they were walking round the ramparts, Gaby was telling Katya about a book she had ordered from Paris.—La Ménopause effacée, apparently if your doctor isn’t a complete idiot you can avoid the whole thing. It simply doesn’t have to happen to you—Being Gaby, she gurgled with laughter, tipped over into the uncontrolled improvisation and patter that sometimes seemed to become compulsive, she would talk at a street-comer or at the door, unable to free people of herself.—You can go on for ever. In theory. Not that anyone would want to, my god... With Pierre, mon pauvre vieux, it’s not much point...and where would I find someone in this place... Can you imagine, like Pierre’s dentist’s wife—you remember, I told you ?—she takes a policeman to the Negresco on his day off every week, she picks him up from the prefecture in Nice, they have a good lunch—She pays for the room...—The laugh rose to a wail—Madame Perrin’s second daughter is at the reception there now—the old Perrin said, it’s comme il faut, mind you—not as if it’s some type picked up on the beach, he’s from the prefecture, a family man.—No—but look, my eyebrows are getting coarse, like an old man’s. Look at these marks on my hands—

  —Keep out of the sun, Gaby.—

  —Keep out the sun!—it’s not the sun, you know it, Katya. My doctor says there’s nothing to be done. He’s a man, what does he care. But it’s not so sure, not at all. We should have been taking hormones years ago, Katya...they say deterioration can’t be repaired but it can be arrested—Like that!—ah, that’s better, that’s the way the skirt should hang... This girl won’t ever need to get old, who knows ?—

  The ship was growing from veil to solidity, from pink to white, and as it listed imbedded itself out there in an ocean laid like a Roman mosaic pavement in wavy bands of pollution to the inshore limits. She and Bernard Chabalier might take a ship, one day; they could be standing somewhere on that advancing object, approaching again the chalky-lavender mountains beyond Nice and the white buildings nested up the cliffs, flashing a fish-scale tiled cupola, blue, green or rose with a gilt spike, and the towers on the shore towards Antibes that spouted up over the sea, leaning, turning slowly on their axes under the wing of the plane, built in the spiral—that aspiring, unfinished figure—that was reduced to the scale of her hand in Arnys’ bar. Rosa took in a great lungful of air out there, causing pins to give way, and the women protested indulgently.—I take the pills he gave me, yes—but I wonder if it’s the best thing ? according to what I’ve read there’re new discoveries all the time. I’m going to take the book and simply say, tell him—But Katya—you examine your breasts, don’t you? It’s essential. You don’t neglect yourself?—

  —You’re the only one who goes to a private doctor. You miss the girls’ gatherings at the clinic; Bobby, Françoise and Marthe, Darby in his oldest cap (afraid they’ll reassess pensions and charge if you look too prosperous). We all have our pap test. You’re crazy to pay.—

  —Pierre’s idea, not mine. He doesn’t trust the clinic doctor—for my part ours is a vieux con. But the breasts—you must do that every month. Just in the bath, I lie in my bath and like this—carefully—I close my eyes and feel—you must concentrate—

  Katya put out a brisk hand to Rosa.—Come down. You seem to like it up there.—Now and then when the French people became absorbed in discussion of bowel movements or other regulations of their bodies’ functions, she could be distinguished as a foreigner among them still. She spoke English, to redefine herself for the eyes of the girl; a comment on preoccupations deftly quitted, disloyally leaving her friend to them.—If someone would write the book that tells how to get old and ugly and not mind.—

  —I don’t understand you too well... ? Gaby looked from one to the other.

  Katya said it for her in French.

  Gaby put on her show of jostling gaiety—Look at that, look at that one!—but Katya, you have still a beauty, êh.—An impressed face pausing at Rosa.—Listen to her—when you have like this (an imitation of the mouth of Françoise or perhaps it was meant to be Marthe) like the anus of a hen...when you are gaga like Poliakoff... then you can complain, êh—She was a dancer, you know that ? The muscles are still supple—The Ballet Russe...—A career was built up in the air.

  Katya seized and crossed hands with her friend in the position of the corps of cygnets, jerking her head to the burst of ‘Swan Lake’ she sang. Their breasts’ bulk shifted from side to side like pillows being plumped.

  Pierre had come up out of the dark of the little stairway and the house, a lonely bald child in search of playmates. He looked at his wife laughing and panting, intimated to Rosa, by drawing up a chair and placing himself carefully, that she and he were the only reasonable beings present.

  Gaby was over at once.—How do you like it ? Isn’t she beautiful ? I’m proud of myself, frankly—

  Her husband gazed, not to be influenced.—Wait. Sit down, Rôse. A dress can’t be judged until you see a woman coming and going, standing and sitting—am I right ?—

  —But it’s good! The colour, with her skin ? The tiny design—real satin fermière—I think the fashion’s amusing—

  —Wait. Yes. It’s good.—

  Rosa walked up and down for them, smiling over her shoulder as she turned the body Chabalier defined for her with his hands, the face he watched with an attention that was only for her.

  The girl’s strong awareness of herself brought to Katya the physical presence she had known, and overlaid by many others: Lionel Burger’s young flesh and face that was always under an attention beyond desire, a passion beyond theirs on the bed, the passion-beyond-passion, like the passion of God, although for him there was no such concept: he was on his own; a frightening being, the young man who thrust his heat inside her in the coldest cities of the world.

  Pierre carried the glass of pastis that was his avuncular intimacy with the girl and tackled her round the neck in a moment’s hug, murmuring with generosity and sense of celebration that needed no tact—The little Rôse en pleine forme, everything is wonderful with you, êh.—

  There’s the desire to create a little store of common experience between lovers, foreigners: while she was living with the Nel family in the dorp hotel on the Springbok Flats, a youth of eighteen was taking his baccalauréat at the Lycée Louis le Grand. The pictures of street cafés, awnings and poodles in the hotel rooms—I told the cleaning girls, that’s Paris, a place in England.

  —You were a show-off and ignorant as most show-offs. Whereas of course I could have put my finger just exactly on the map of Africa where your aunt and uncle had their small hotel—He stroked away on her eyelids and in the bend of her elbows the years and places that could not exist, his for her, hers for him. Those of the present and immediate past did not seem to have much importance. Since she had taken down the plate and sold that house, she had lived with friends; in a flat; in a cottage with some young man who had paused in his wanderings about the world; and then a flat again, the same city.—It’s a condominium in the quinzième, not bad, Christine found it when they were replanning the interior so it’s more or less according to her idea. At least I have a small room to work in—before I used to have my table in the bedroom, and if I wanted to work late...the other person gets fed up, wants to go to bed. There’s a big terrace where the kids can keep their bicycles—but she’s cluttered it with a lot of plants, I’m not so keen—

  Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier were easily matched to these contingent circumstances; wearing the same clothes covering the same newly-discovered minutely-
known bodies they could be set walking along streets that had scuffed the shoes they wore now in each other’s presence, could be seen standing in grey European raincoat on a metro platform, turning home into one of the new rectangles pushed between florid nineteenth-century mansards and frail yellowed walls of earlier buildings, or followed—a small, strong girl whose shoulder-muscles of an open-air country’s physique moved in a bare-backed dress, like the one she was wearing—through traffic of black men on bicycles and women with bundles on their heads that was familiar footage from television news.

  When their delight in each other brimmed and its energies turned outwards, they liked to go fishing. The old car borrowed from Katya tackled tracks tunnelled beside the Loup; they shared the modest opportunities of a catch with young husbands in caps given away at petrol stations, old fellows with wives who knitted and minded paper bags holding bait, bread and wine; and all were startled together by the descent of wandering bands of hoarse teenagers who pushed one another about, splashed and went away, leaving the shuddering markings of light and shade to settle again on figures and water, working them over in a way that broke up limits and made one single state of being for a whole summer afternoon.

  They looked at paintings.—In Africa, one goes to see the people. In Europe, it’s pictures.—

  But she was seeing in Bonnard canvases past which they were being moved as if processed by the crowd, a confirmation of the experience running within her. The people she was living among, the way of apprehending, of being alive, at the river, were coexistent with the life fixed by the painter’s vision. And how could that be ? —When you look at a painting, it’s something that’s over, isn’t it ? —it’s a record of what’s already passed through the painter’s mind, both the event of seeing and the concept that arises from it—the imagining—are fixed in paint. So a picture is always abstract, to me—the style of painting hasn’t much to do with it. But when Katya and I go and lie under the olive trees...even my room, you know, the room she gave me—the flowers in a jar on the floor, and his flowers, this bouquet of mimosa... These pictures are proof of something. It is the people I’m living among I’m seeing, not the pictures.—

  —And do you know why, my darling ? This woman here stepping through the leaves, and this mimosa—the woman he painted in eighteen-ninety-four (look in the catalogue, it’s written), the mimosa in ‘45 during the war, during the Occupation, yes ? All right. In the fifty years between the two paintings, there was the growth of fascism, two wars—the Occupation—And for Bonnard it is as if nothing’s happened. Nothing. Look at them... He could have painted them the same summer, the same day. And that’s how they are, those ones up there round the château—that’s how they live. It’s as if nothing has ever happened—to them, or anybody. Or is happening. Anywhere. No prisoners in Soviet asylums, no South Africa...no migrant workers living without women just down the road...no ‘place of protection’ at Arène—right under our noses, over there in Marseilles—already this year seven thousand poor devils have been locked up there like stray animals before they’re deported... To be alive day by day: the same as in Bonnard —tout voir pour la premiere fois, à la fois. Until the age of eighty. Oh that’s charming...of course, if you can manage it. Look here—and there—the woman’s flesh and the leaves round her are so beautiful and they are equal manifestations. Because she hasn’t any existence any more than the leaves have, outside this lovely forest where they are. No past, no future. The mimosa: fifty years later, it’s alive in the same summer as she is. There hasn’t been any Hitler, concentration camps—The slow-moving surge of people in holiday clothes pushed them away out of the galleries to the shallow steps and down to a courtyard of sculptured figures elongated as late shadows. His muscular legs with their shining straight black hair, and his pale European hands with the thin gold ring of his family status shone softly in the shade.—no bombings, no German occupation. Your forest girl and the vase of mimosa—c’est un paradis inventé.—

  They were both wearing shorts and as they strolled his leg brushed hers like the weaving of an affectionate cat.

  —If I did come to Paris—

  —You will come, you will come—He went ahead along a narrow path under pinkish-blue-trunked pine trees, putting out a hand to lead her behind him.

  —I can’t imagine how it would be—work out. How I would see you.—

  —As you are seeing me now. Every day.—

  —I’d be—where ?—

  —Some nice little hotel. Near the lycée. So that I can come quickly to you. I want first to show you la dame à la licorne in the Cluny.—

  —You will arrange treats for me.—

  —What is that ?—

  —When you take children out to amuse them.—

  —Ah no. I love her, I can’t let you go any longer without knowing you have seen her too.—

  Rosa leant beside him on a stone wall, looking on slopes with vineyards spread out to ripen in the sun and olive trees stooped along abandoned terracing broken by old farmhouses and new villas. A shirtless man was tiptoeing across a tiled roof he was repairing; a woman’s arms and stance were those of someone yelling up at him, although she was too far away to be heard. Farther still, on the strip of sea threaded behind the sandcastle towers, flags and belfries of hill-top villages, a ship like a spouting whale sent up white smoke. She followed the woman stepping back and back to see the man on the roof as if completing a figure that was leading to a tapestry on a museum wall from a room in an hotel that would be particular among streets of such hotels. Her chin was lifted and she was smiling, grimacing with lips pressed together in some shy and awkward mastery. Bernard saw the man on the roof;—The belly he’s got on him. Il va se casser la gueule, vieux con... Maybe even a little apartment. It’s not easy, but I have a few ideas. I know just what you’d like—a little studio in an old building...but usually they are stinking...the passages...you can’t imagine. No, we’ll find something better.—He no longer saw the man on the roof, the woman, the valley; eyes were drawn as if against glare, against thoughts in the language where she could not follow him.—Mind you, an hotel—then there’s always the concierge, if you need anything and I’m not—The long mouth with the thin upper line reacted with sadness and shrewd obstinacy to objections she did not know about; the steady eyes came to a warm, assuring focus, denying them.—I’m absolutely sure something can be done through the right people. The anti-apartheid committee can get you temporary residence and even a work permit. If not for you, then who the hell ? But discreetly ... Though of course they’d love to have you on a platform, Rosa, you can believe it... And we could get that film of your father, it would be—but no, of course not, not until you have French papers. They’d jump at the idea of you—probably they’ll make a job for you right away. And there are my contacts. Not bad. Quite a few black academics who have influence in French-speaking African countries they come from—There are so many projects and never enough people to go. It’s possible you could get a job doing wonderful work, medical training in Cameroun or Brazzaville, somewhere like that—I’ve many times been offered a lectureship at one of those black universities there, a year’s contract, there wouldn’t be any question of moving the family.—

  They had taken on without thinking one of the ancient groupings of the couple; found a place in the grass where she folded her legs beneath her and he laid his head against her belly, feeling it shake when she laughed and hearing the muffled questioning sounds of her gut as a child of his in her would.—I’ll come alone. We’d have a whole year.—

  —I was talking with the dear boys before you came to Arnys’ yesterday. They were consulting their horoscopes in Marie-Claire. Very serious. You know, I just found I had the words, I could put them together without thinking—The face turned up to hers was the face he must have had ten years earlier, a face to be curious about, smoothed like a piece of paper under the heel of a hand, unmarked by lines of ambitious anxiety, and as it was before the chin-crevice was deep
ened by sensual intelligence.—Oh your French will be fine. You’ll manage perfectly all right. Maybe in Africa I’ll even finish my bloody book. Ah, that’s very good: one of the reasons for my taking the job after all will be that it’s necessary to go back to colonial sources and so on.—

  All practical matters were open between them; a wife and two children, a responsibility assumed long ago by a responsible man. The attitude on which Bernard and Rosa’s acceptance of this circumstance rested was based on one of the simple statements of a complex man:—I live among my wife and children—not with them.—

  The statement, in turn, seemed to seek an explanation from Rosa she could not give; but in the saying, the burden of it was shifted a little, her shoulder went under it beside his. They had no home but he was living very much with her. The security was almost palpable for him in the vigour and repose of her small body. Resting there, he gained what she had once and many times at the touch-line of her father’s chest, warm and sounding with the beat of his heart, in chlorinated water. Her eyes (the colour of light, creating unease; Boer eyes, pied-noir eyes?)—moved above his head among trees, passers-by and—quick glance down—in a private motivation of inner vision as alert and dissimulating as the gaze her mother had been equally unaware of, looking up to see the daughter coming slowly over the gravel from the visit to her ‘fiancé’ in prison.

  The young smooth face spoke out beneath hers; from what he had been and what he was:—You are the dearest thing in the world to me.—

  At gatherings they lost each other in the generality and then would become aware, near by, of the back of a head or a voice: she heard a slightly different version of Bernard Chabalier giving a slightly different version of what he had said about the painter.—fifty years, fauvism, futurism, cubism, abstract art—for him everything passes as nothing. 1945 is 1895. Maybe what is complete is timeless...but events change the consciousness of the world, it shakes and the shocks register seismographically in movements in art—