Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

A twinge moved a muscle beside the straight, wide-winged nose. I pretended to be innocent of staring at the face of a stranger. He had round his thin neck with pimples like gravel under the silver-black skin there, a chain with an animal tooth bobbing with his heart-beat, one of the bits of home I’d seen blacks like him selling, all day, bean-necklaces and crude masks and snakeskin wallets, shaking West African rattles in the Tuileries to attract custom. I heard or felt something drop. I said to him — I don’t know what — and it was in English, of course, or maybe in Afrikaans (because that was what I had spoken on the plane and my tongue was still coupled with that speech centre). He wouldn’t have understood, anyway, even if he had not been deaf with fear, because I was not speaking in French or Fulani or whatever it was would have meaning for him. And if I had appealed to the people around us — they wouldn’t have understood either. I didn’t know the French, didn’t have the words to explain the hand in mine.

I let go. I let him go. He couldn’t run.

Somehow I managed to butt down and feel for my purse or wallet of traveller’s cheques or passport. I brought up from among feet a little black book; he had felt for leather, and come up with the address book in which, anyway, I have been trained to record nothing more valuable than the whereabouts of hotels and American Express offices. We were still close. His fear of me melted to a presence of connivance and contempt; because if I wouldn’t denounce him while I held him, no one need believe me now that I had set him free. It was a secret between us, among them; a ridiculous position we were in, until leisurely — he couldn’t hurry like a thief — he made himself appear to be pushed again, to drift on, moving thin shoulders swinging in a tenth-hand aspiration, someone’s once-plum-coloured jacket with the hunched cut I’d seen that day on sharp young Frenchmen dressed as they thought the rich and successful did.

Iwent by way of Paris not to lead to you: my father’s first wife. Brandt Vermeulen didn’t think of her when he was making sure I’d understood whom I was expected to keep clear of. Yet no one who has ever been associated with my father will ever be off the list of suspects that is never torn up. If it could have occurred to anyone hers was the village, the house, she the one for whom I would make when they let me out — but who remembers her?

I feel an ass, among them: thinking how I came among these people who know such tactics only in their television policiers (the old Lesbians are addicts); for whom running down to the baker is a sociable act by which everyone else knows what time they’ve got up for breakfast, and whose contact with the police is an exchange of badinage about the inside story of the latest bank hold-up in Nice while they stand together with their midday pernods in Jean-Paul’s bar. Out of place: not I, myself — they assume my life is theirs, they’ve taken me in. But the manner of my coming — it doesn’t fit necessity or reality, here. Lionel Burger’s first wife. You are not to be found in Madame Bagnelli, their Katya. I could see that the particular form of baptism by which she got that name came back to her when I asked, the first day at the gate (before I’d seen my lovely room, this cool belfry of a house where their voices fly around) what I should call her. For them you’re Katya because in a small community of different and sometimes confused European origins mixed with the native French, diminutives and adaptations of names are a cosy lingua franca .

I suppose for them the name places you vaguely among the White Russians. Like old Ivan Poliakoff whose love stories you type at four francs a page. When I met him, with you in the village, he kissed my hand, lifting it in one so frail I felt the blood pushing slowly through the veins. I ask what the stories are about? Such a very old man, one can’t imagine he can remember what it was like — love, sex. You tell me you have suggested he write romantic historical stuff about the affairs of counts and countesses, Russian aristocrats, using the setting of the great country estates where he spent his childhood.

— At least the background would be something he knows. But no, his characters are groupies who get picked up by American film actors at the Cannes Festival or teenage heroin addicts who are saved by devoted pop-singers. He thinks he’s learnt the vocabulary from telly — hopeless, the manuscripts come straight back. And then he expects me to lower my rate to three francs!—

People here don’t know I’m as removed from young life around the Cannes Film Festival as the ancient Russian count who won’t tell his age. — What’s a groupie?—

Their Katya’s complaining about Poliakoff becomes a performance she improvises along our laughter. — Look at the handwriting. Need a bloody code expert to unhook his G’s from E‘s — a wire cutter never mind a magnifying glass — can you believe it? B’s like those old-fashioned carpet-beaters-and on top of everything he writes in bed at night after he’s put his face-pack on — d’you see! page all smeared with cucumber milk or yoghurt and egg-yolk or whatever it is he concocts — sometimes I just make up a sentence myself to fill in, Delphine sniffs cocaine from Marcel’s manly armpit, he doesn’t notice the difference…more likely sees I’ve improved the thing and too jealous to admit—

— What’s a groupie, anyway—

— You know. One of those girls who follow singers and actors around. Tear the shirts off their backs. Or they just worship with fixed eyes — Ivan’s do.—

I giggle with their Katya like the adolescent girls at school, who were in that phase while Sipho Mokoena was showing Tony and me the bullet hole in his trouser-leg and I was running back and forth to visit prison, the first prison, where my mother was. The oriental-looking head of Christ that is half-painted, half-stamped on leather is a present from Ivan Poliakoff — the first ikon I have ever seen. You took me to an exhibition of famous ones on loan from the Hermitage in Leningrad; Gregorian chants were being relayed as we spent a whole morning looking at the face of the pale and swarthy outcast. You said, He’s so beautiful I could believe in him. In some examples his crown of thorns was spiked with red jewels, to represent blood, I suppose. A beige-and-white couple whose silk clothes suggested they were worn once and thrown away, examined the rubies and garnets close-up, silent, she with a pair of half-lens gilt glasses, passing the catalogue between their hands soft and clean as new kid gloves, clustered with gold. Coming around behind us was a young American with an arm along his wife’s nape, a baby in a seat on his back and a five- or six-year-old by the hand. He showed the little boy the Christian mask that represents the world’s suffering the way Japanese masks represent various states of being, in the theatre. — See Kimmie, that’s our Lord, he probably looked a whole lot more like that than the man with blue eyes and blond hair they show you in Grade School.—

Then we went to swim at one of the coves between Antibes and Juan les Pins Katya’s friends regard as their own preserve, keeping among yourselves the difficult and unexpected way to get down, trespassing and scrambling past restaurant dustbins. I could lead anyone, by now. We pooled our picnic lunch with Donna and Didier. It was the last time this summer they would come there, she said, the Swedes and Germans arrive after the middle of June; one will have to swim off-shore from the yacht. She’s very orderly-minded; impulse does not rule this woman who can do whatever she likes. I gather from conversations she sails to the Bahamas in November, goes skiing in January, and likes to travel somewhere she hasn’t been before — in the East, or Africa, say, for a month late in the European summer. She’s surprised I don’t know the African countries where she has gone game-watching and sight-seeing. She talks about them and I listen along with the other Europeans like Gaby Grosbois, for whom Africa is a holiday they can’t afford. It’s not possible to say how old this Donna is — again something she has determined with all her resources, the great-granddaughter of a Canadian railway millionaire, you tell me: this woman with long, pale red crinkly hair tied back from a handsome, naked face, a shine of bright down around the mouth and lower cheeks in the sun, has the same kind of frontier background I have. The Burgers were trekking to the Transvaal when the great-grandfather was laying rails across Indian territory. It’s an accident of birth, that’s all, whether one has a grandfather who has chosen a country where his descendants can become rich and not question the right, or whether it turns out to be one where the patrimony consists of discovering for oneself by what way of life the right to belong there must be earned by each succeeding generation, if it can be earned at all. I suppose her hair has faded. There may even be white strands blended into its thickness, one wouldn’t notice. She is probably forty-five or more, once a big pink-faced girl who still has mannish dimples poked reddening into the parentheses enclosing her smile. Sometimes when she is following what someone is saying to her she bares her teeth without smiling, a mannerism like a pleased snarl. I notice this habit because it’s the only sign of the strong sexuality I would expect to find in a woman who feels the need to buy a young lover. You and Gaby — Madame Bagnelli and Madame Grosbois — agree that this one is the best she’s had, not ‘a little bitch’ (you use the derogatory inversions of Lesbian friends) like Vaki the Greek, his predecessor.