Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

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.

It 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 .

— Where do you stay when you come to Paris?—

— I don’t come to Paris.—

— You thought you were being followed.—

— Ah that. Two nights; I was on my way here. The first and only time.—

His hunch of face against hands accepted that he had not been answered. — Do you want more wine? Or coffee? — For himself he spoke to the barman plainly and severely, as if to forestall any irritating objections. — I know it’s summer. I know it’s Quatorze Juillet. But you have lemons? I want lemon juice — hot.—

— No more wine. I’ll have that too.—

— You’re sure you’ll like it? Not some exotic French drink, you know, just sour lemon juice.—

— I understood.—

— When I was a student in London I used to ask the way on a bus. They would tell me, ten kind people at once… Yes, yes, grinning at them, thank you — but I was lost. It’s a matter of pride, standing up to the chauvinism of the foreign language. At press conferences you hear a visiting statesman so eloquent in his own language — and then suddenly he tries a few words in French…an idiot speaking, an analphabetic from some wretched forgotten hamlet learning to read at the age of seventy.—

The girl did not seem intimidated. — I’m used to it. I’ve been speaking two mother-tongues all my life and I’ve always been surrounded by other languages I don’t understand.—

— I speak English—

She gestured his competence; he was not impressed by his achievement — Well I worked there six years — but I don’t know that we’ll understand each other, eh.—

— Why not? — She took up the formula for a man and woman amusing themselves for half an hour.

— If you talk like that, yes. I say what I think will flatter you and make myself interesting. I like this. Don’t you think that . Each makes an exhibit — I can’t go through that. That’s not what I… That’s right, don’t answer…it’s embarrassing not to flirt, not to spread the tail-feathers and cocorico—

One of Arnys’ young men looking down his cheeks glided two glasses in saucers before them. The man poured the little packet of sugar into the cloudy liquid and stirred medicinally; Rosa did the same. He reached for more sugar.

— What did you do?—

She felt again the grip in which she held a hand in the street named Rue de la Harpe. He waited for her to answer and she tasted the lemon juice and took swallows in sips because it was very hot. — Nothing.—