Burger's Daughter (37 page)

—What can they expect! They've asked for it. They allowed themselves to be brain-washed into believing they're a superior race. Running with refrigerators! It will come. Three hundred years, enough! You are outcast... they throw you in prison to die if you try to change them—Madame Bagnelli had the air of one carried away by whatever company she found herself in to profess preoccupations and opinions at one with theirs. With the Grosbois, she was as animated a participant in their decision to eat organically-grown vegetables or Gaby's interest in the alterations
Nice-Matin
reported were being made to the villa of the Shah of Iran's sister.

—This girl could make a good living here. She would do well. I mean it—Georges leant forward to draw everyone to the sudden idea of supporting their own local political refugee.—The yacht people, there are always pains and aches when you take too much exercise... they hurt themselves water-skiing and I don't know what. Really, it's amazing, how my leg feels, you know, relaxed—the muscles—The convinced shrewdness of his blue eyes canvassed.

—And even in the village!—

—No one who does that kind of work—

—Aië, aië, what about papers ?—Madame Bagnelli looked at Rosa gaily in the enthusiasm of Georges and Manolis.—She has to have permission to work, a permit—

Georges mimed away the maunderings of despised officialdom. —Pah-pah-pah. She doesn't ask. No one knows. She gets paid in cash, she puts it in her pocket.—Fingers extended fastidiously, with the ring set with a gold seal from the reign of Alexander the Great worn in betrothal to Manolis, the palm of one hand wiped itself off against the other.

 

 

Katya took Rosa to hear nightingales. They locked the gate but rooms were open behind them, the candles smoked on the littered table. Up on the terrace, they might still have been there, in the warm still night voices hung.

Down the steep streets with gravity propelling them gently, under street-lamps fluttering pennants of tiny bats, shouldered by the walls of the houses of friends, through lilting staccato-punctuated voices swung about by music coming from the
place
, whiffs of dog-shit and human urine in Saracen archways, arpeggios of laughter flying in the chatter of knives and dishes from the restaurant where a table of French people sat late under young leaves of a grape-vine translucent to the leaping shadows of their gestures. (—You never understand what makes them so euphoric in the ritual of feasting together—not even when you understand their language perfectly.—Katya was proudly fascinated by the tribal impenetrability of the people she lived among.) Past the little villas of the dead with the urns of their marble gardens sending out perfume of cut carnations as from the vase in any family livingroom ; the hoof-clatter of linked couples approaching and trotting away on their platform soles, the stertorous swathe cut by motorcycles, the quiet chirrups of older people wandering the village as at an exhibition of stone, light, doorways fringed with curtains of plastic strips, the faces of carved lions melted by centuries back to the contours of features forming in a foetus. In the remnant of forest ravine all this familiar element was suddenly gone like torn paper drawn up a flue by the draught of flames. It had lifted away above the flood-lit battlements of that castle domestic as a tame dragon. Katya plunged through littered thickets, some quiet vixen or badger of a woman, cunningly coexisting with caravan parks and autoroutes. Rosa strolled this harmless European jungle.

—Wait. Wait—

Katya's breathing touched her as pine-needles did. All around the two women a kind of piercingly sweet ringing was on the limit of being audible. A new perception was picking up the utmost ring of waves whose centre must be unreachable ecstasy. The thrilling of the darkness intensified without coming closer. She gave a stir, questioning; the shape of Katya's face turned to stay her. The vibrating glass in which they were held shattered into song. The sensation of receiving the song kept changing; now it was a sky-slope on which they planed, tipped, sailed, twirled to earth; then it was a breath stopped at the point of blackout and passing beyond it to a pitch hit, ravishingly, again, again, again.

Katya hooked the girl's arm when the path widened. Their feet carried them towards the village.—It goes on all night. Every summer. If I can't sleep, I just come out at two or three in the morning... Oh I have them always, every year.—

I
n the middle of winter, seven months pregnant
,
to teach night-classes in some freezing old warehouse
...
okay, I was ‘disciplined'
—
how ashamed I was !
—had
to be disciplined because of my bourgeois tendencies to put my private life first. I remember I cried...

Murmuring, up there, like schoolgirls under the bed-clothes. Laughter.

Once I was suspended from the Party for ‘inactivity'...when they gave something a name, I can tell you...it meant anything they decided. ‘From each according to his ability'...I was dancing in some bloody terrible revue six nights a week
—
can you believe it ? I had to
—
Lionel was an intern earning almost nothing, he walked the floor with the baby when he came home. But on Sundays I used to take my little street theatre group I'd got together out to the black townships on the back of a furniture remover's lorry...oh baby and all. They had it in for me. I wouldn't go to their old lectures on Marxist-Leninism-I could read it all for myself ?
—
no, you were supposed to sit there listening to them drone on. One poor devil, I forget her name
—
she was even accused of trying to poison the comrades by boiling water for tea in a suspect-looking can. One of the Trotskyites who was expelled...

What did he say?

I've never talked with anyone as I do with you, incontinently, femininely.

Dick was the only one... well, he didn't exactly defend me, how could anyone
—
I suppose I really wasn't good material. But there was some sort of little
(an amused pause, mutually culpable in the understanding of our sex)—
something
—
going on at one time. Much later, during the war. I knew he really liked me. He thought I was an extraordinary creature... a few kisses managed in the most unlikely circumstances... oh innocent Dick. We despised the subjection of women to bourgeois morality but he was scared of Ivy and he had schoolboy feelings of honour and whatnot towards his comrade. He worshipped him. He once told me: Lionel will be our Lenin. I think
—
now yes, don't let me lie, we actually slept together once. In Ivy's bed ! Good god. Don't strange things excite men ? Funnily enough, I remember the sheets. I've never forgotten her sheets. They were embroidered, chainstitch daisies and so on, bright pink and blue
—
she always wore such awful clothes ! She was away at some conference in Durban with Indians. We were supposed to be roneoing pamphlets. Sweet Dick. But compared with somebody like Lionel...the affair didn't have much of a chance. It wasn't exactly anything to worry about. I can't imagine what he'd look like now... his jacket always used to be hitched up on his bum, quite unaware of himself, I used to feel the giggles coming on...

What did he say?

You've never asked me why I came and I don't ask that, either. You tell me anecdotes of your youth that could transform my own. Several times I could almost have exchanged in the same way an anecdote about how I used to dress up and visit my ‘fiancé' in jail, wearing Aletta's
verloofring.
I could imitate the way the warders talk, and you would laugh with the pleasure of the softened reminiscence. That's exactly it!—the brutishness and guileless sentimentality of grandmother Marie Burger's
taal
in their mouths. Of course I know what we're like when there's some little thing going on—when Didier gave me my chance, taking a toe for nipple or clitoris. What'd he say, your husband, when his dancing-girl was disciplined ? It must have seemed so petty to him—the blancoed shoes, your tears. Or maybe he saw this ideological spit-and-polish as essential training for the unquestioning acceptance of actions unquestioningly performed, the necessity of which was to come later. He may have smiled and consoled you by making love to you; but seen the faithful go ahead and discipline you because you preferred amateur theatricals to Marxist-Leninist education.

The little something going on with comrade Dick—what'd he say then ? Perhaps he didn't notice. You deceived him because you were not of his calibre; it was your revenge for being lesser, poor girl, you were made fully conscious of your shortcomings by his not even noticing the sort of peccadilloes you'd console yourself with.

All these things I see and understand while we're shelling peas, ripping out a hem with an old blade, walking in the cork woods, watching the fishermen put out to sea, slumping with our bare feet on the day-warmed stone after your friends have gone home to bed. It's easy, with you. I'm happy with you—I see it all the way he did; smiling and looking on, charmed by you although you've grown fat and the liveliness Katya must have had has coarsened into clownishness and the power of attraction sometimes deteriorates into what I don't want to watch—a desire to please—just to please, without remembering how, any more.

A little something going on. What did he say?

He couldn't say anything because by then there was the real revolutionary: you recognized my mother the first time you saw her. Nobody has ever told me, but the accepted version, the understanding is that Katya left Lionel Burger—that was in character for someone so unsuitable (even she recognizes this, in later life) for the man he was to become. She left him for another man or another life—same thing, really, what else is there for a woman who won't live for the Future ? You haven't contradicted this version. But I see that whatever you did, you and he and my mother knew he said nothing because of her. Back there where we come from someone's writing a definitive life in which this will be left out. Anyway, if you
were
to ask me—I didn't come on some pilgrimage, worshipping or iconoclastic, to learn about my father. There must have been some strong reason, though, why I hit with closed eyes upon this house, this French village; reason beyond my reasoning that surveillance wouldn't think to look for me there.

I wanted to know how to defect from him. The former Katya has managed to be able to write to me that he was a great man, and yet decide ‘there's a whole world' outside what he lived for, what life with him would have been.

I
t was easy for Rosa Burger to turn aside from the calculated pleasures of Didier; she had never been the same age as Tatsu, playing with her dog in the old man's garden. At one of the summer gatherings she told a man she had never met before and probably would never meet again her version of an incident in Paris when a man tried to steal money from her bag.—He found me out.—

—In what ?—

—I thought someone else might be keeping an eye on what I was doing.—

—A pickpocket. Poor devil.—

—Yes.—

—A black man.—

—Yes.—

The Frenchman she had had this conversation with in English was still in the village on Bastille Day—some of these friends-of-friends were about only for a weekend; names and faces introduced with enthusiasm as a brother-in-law, a cousin, a ‘colleague' from Paris or Lyon, his transience giving the host a dimension of connection with seats of government, commerce and fashionable opinions. He was on the
place
like everybody else dancing, watching others dance, and applauding and kissing when the fireworks went off from the top of the castle. Katya and Manolis, Manolis and Rosa, Katya and Pierre, Gaby and the local mayor, Rosa and the car-salesman son of the confectioner, hopped and swung past Georges snapping castanet fingers; some beautiful models from Cannes stood about tossing their hair like good children told not to romp and spoil their best clothes; and he was one of the city Frenchmen with neat buttocks, fitted shirts and sweaters knotted by the sleeves round their necks, whose cosmopolitan presence strengthened the family party against the tourist element. He danced with her, rather badly, twitching a cheek at the painful music coming from a festooned platform. He was at the other end of the table when eight or ten of the friends ate at a restaurant together after loud and serious discussion about dishes and cost. Gaby Grosbois had taken charge. —I will arrange a good price with Marcelle. Moules marinières, salad—what do we drink, Blanc de Blancs... ?—She strode off to the whistling of the Marseillaise, swinging her backside with a mock military strut.

The tiny restaurant was a single intimate uproar. Marcelle's barman sang in
argot
and in the course of one song snatched a curved
ficelle
from the bread-basket and jigged among the tables holding it thrust up from between his legs with priapic glee. It wagged at shrieking women—Katya, Gaby—Mesdames, just look, don't touch—With a flourish, like someone putting a flower in a buttonhole, he stuck it in Pierre Grosbois' groin, from where, to the applause of laughter, Grosbois, by tightening his thigh muscles, managed to rap it against the table.

In the disorder of chairs pulled back and the face-bobbing goodnight embraces the stranger paused vaguely at Rosa.—We'll go and have a drink.—

They lost the others in the jostle of the
place
.

—Where?—He stopped and lit a cigarette in a dark archway; for him, she was the local inhabitant.

They went to Arnys, who did not seem to recognize the foreign girl outside the context of her usual company. The old woman went on playing patience in the chiffon dress that rode up on huge legs stemming from little tight pumps like satin hooves. Her blind, matted Maltese dog came over and squirted a few drops at his chair:
Chabalier
, he was writing for Rosa, on the margin of a newspaper lying on the bar,
Bernard Chabalier
.