Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— 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.