Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

They had seen each other. The understanding spun a thread along which they were being drawn together while the girl took her turn; almost at the immigration booth, now; now there, putting the green passport on the counter for an official hand to draw under the glass partition; bending suddenly to dig in the bulging sling-bag (a hitch? a document missing? — the woman craned on her toes.) The eyes-down face of someone under surveillance. A faint, sideways smile to the woman watching. (Nothing wrong; just the usual traveller’s start of anxiety that something has been remembered too late.) The girl was pushing the green passport into a pocket on the outside of the bag. She drew the zip firmly closed. She moved on, she was in: received. Coming across the few yards, through the barrier, the whole of her could be seen clear of other people, small girl with a sexy, ignored body (the mother had always somehow ignored her own beauty, found it of no account) dressed in the inevitable jeans outfit yet never in a thousand years would have passed for one of the young from yachts and hotels and villas wearing the same thing. Pretty. But not young-looking. A face seen on a child who looks like a woman.

The corners of the mouth dented but the lips remained tightly closed, the strangely light eyes were fixed on the woman with an expression of self-amazement, as if the girl doubted her own existence at that moment, in that place.

They had never seen one another before. The woman’s worn lilac-coloured espadrilles splayed sturdily in welcome. She held her arms in a wide tackle and her mouth was parted, smiling, smiling.

The aircraft Rosa Burger boarded was bound for France. The destination on her ticket was Paris but after two nights in a small hotel where she did not unpack she flew back in the direction she had come from, south, to Nice. There she was met on a beautiful May morning by a Madame Bagnelli, who when she was very young had gone to the Sixth Congress in Moscow, had been or tried to be a dancer, was once married to Lionel Burger. She had a son by him living in Tanzania whom she had not seen since he was a student; she took his daughter home to her house in a medieval village, preserved to make money out of tourists, where — the people who had known her in South Africa heard — she had been living for years.

She talked all the way above the noise of the old Citroen into which she settled herself like a sitting hen. There was an impression of speed beyond the car’s capacity, because of her style of driving and the jig of windows that opened like flaps. She had had a terrible feeling it was the wrong day — she should have been at the airport yesterday — she had rummaged everywhere to check with the letter — put away too carefully — that was why she was so excited, relieved when she saw—

— You’d given me the phone number.—

— Oh I was afraid if you arrived and I wasn’t there — you’d just have gone off again — I was so worried—

Changing from lane to lane of traffic along a sea-front, bursts of conversation in another tongue, scenes from unimaginable lives in the space of a car window and the pause at a red light, palm-trees, whiffs of nougat against carbon monoxide, pink oleanders, fish shining in a shop open to the street, pennants fluttering round a car mart, old men in pomponned caps bending over balls, shop-signs silently mouthed — Oh that — fort, château, same thing, all their castles were fortifications. That’s Antibes. We’ll go one day — the Picasso museum’s inside. Good god, what’s he think he’s doing, quel con , my god, ça va pas la tête, êh ? These kids on scooters, they attack like wasps. It’s twelve o’clock, that’s why this town is hell, everyone rushing home for lunch…don’t worry, we’ll make it, I just must stop for bread — are you hungry? I hope you’ve got a good appetite, mmh? — Would you rather have lettuce or cress? You must say. Start off the way we’re going to go on, you know — I’m not going to treat you like a visitor.—

She came out of the baker’s and pushed a baton of bread through the window. At the greengrocer next door she turned to smile at her passenger. In the wisp of tissue-paper that belted it, the bread crackled under the pressure of Rosa Burger’s hand; she sniffed the loaf like a flower; the woman’s smile broadened and mimed — go on, take a bite. Children in pinafores were being dragged past by brusque young women or old ones in slippers who blocked the pavement while they gossiped. On balconies, men ate lunch in their vests. The tables outside a bar were tiny islands round which people greeted each other with a kiss on either cheek. Rosa Burger sat in the car like an effigy borne in procession. Out of the town, past plant nurseries and cement works, the light on the new leaves of vines hunched like cripples, grey-headed olives surviving among villas, the sea appearing and disappearing from bend to bend — They told me over the phone, a direct plane tonight so of course I thought my god I‘ve — then I told myself, stop fussing… I’m so glad you’ve come before the pear and apple’s quite over — look — up there, d’you know whose house that is? Renoir lived there—

A frail foam pricked through by green on trees hollowed like wine glasses; where? where? The girl gazed at a day without landmarks. No sooner was something pointed out than it was behind; to the driver all was so familiar she saw what was no longer visible. The car began to buck up a steep gravelly way between the park secrecy of European riverine forest, roadside tapestry flowers ashy with dust. Like the sea, a castle turned this way and that. — Poor things, more tin cans than fish in our river these days, but they keep trying. You actually do see some with a tiddler or two… — A child’s pop-up picture book castle at the pinnacle of grey and yellow-rose houses and walls, rising from the apartment blocks that filled the valley like vast white ocean liners berthed from the distant sea. Awnings bellied; leaning people were dreamily letting the car pass across their eyes an image like that in the convex mirror set up at the blind intersection. Shutters were closed; unknown people hidden undiscoverable behind there. A woman on a vélo with a child dangling legs through the parcel-carrier was drawn level with, greeted, wobbling and puttering, overtaken. — She does for me, you’ll meet her on Tuesday, what hell with that child when it was little, peed on my bed and when it started to crawl! It was into everything, biscuits crumbled on my papers and books — how do you feel? About children? I am a grandmother I suppose, but for me it’s so long since I handled… How old are you, Rosa? I was thinking last night, how old can she be, that girl — twenty-three? No? Nearer twenty-five? Seven — my god.—

A woman with gold tinsel hair in the sun leaned on a cane to let them pass, a middle-aged man spilling belly over jeans gestured with his pipe, the girl with a smile of oriental persistence held out of the car’s way a spaniel dancing about her on its lead: the driver waved to all without looking. — You’re in a room at the top, a lot of stairs to climb, I’m warning you — but there’s a terrace, the roof of the adjoining house actually but they let me fix it up. I thought you’d like to be able to step out when you wake up in the mornings. Sunbathe, do what you like. Get away from me or anyone, quite private. If you’d rather you can have the smaller room on the first floor? — well, you’ll see…a jumble of a house like all the houses, the whole village’s a warren, every one’s built against the next, if my plumbing goes wrong you have to go to the neighbour’s to find the leak…you’ll see, you’ll just say if you’d rather come downstairs. But that room adjoins mine; I don’t mind, but you might… we could close off the door between us, of course. The top room used to be Bagnelli’s room, when he was home…I should tell you, he died four years ago. It was fifteen years. We never actually married, but everyone…—