Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Pierre carried the glass of pastis that was his avuncular intimacy with the girl and tackled her round the neck in a moment’s hug, murmuring with generosity and sense of celebration that needed no tact — The little Rôse en pleine forme , everything is wonderful with you, êh.—

There’s the desire to create a little store of common experience between lovers, foreigners: while she was living with the Nel family in the dorp hotel on the Springbok Flats, a youth of eighteen was taking his baccalauréat at the Lycée Louis le Grand. The pictures of street cafés, awnings and poodles in the hotel rooms — I told the cleaning girls, that’s Paris, a place in England.

— You were a show-off and ignorant as most show-offs. Whereas of course I could have put my finger just exactly on the map of Africa where your aunt and uncle had their small hotel — He stroked away on her eyelids and in the bend of her elbows the years and places that could not exist, his for her, hers for him. Those of the present and immediate past did not seem to have much importance. Since she had taken down the plate and sold that house, she had lived with friends; in a flat; in a cottage with some young man who had paused in his wanderings about the world; and then a flat again, the same city. — It’s a condominium in the quinzième , not bad, Christine found it when they were replanning the interior so it’s more or less according to her idea. At least I have a small room to work in — before I used to have my table in the bedroom, and if I wanted to work late…the other person gets fed up, wants to go to bed. There’s a big terrace where the kids can keep their bicycles — but she’s cluttered it with a lot of plants, I’m not so keen—

Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier were easily matched to these contingent circumstances; wearing the same clothes covering the same newly-discovered minutely-known bodies they could be set walking along streets that had scuffed the shoes they wore now in each other’s presence, could be seen standing in grey European raincoat on a metro platform, turning home into one of the new rectangles pushed between florid nineteenth-century mansards and frail yellowed walls of earlier buildings, or followed — a small, strong girl whose shoulder-muscles of an open-air country’s physique moved in a bare-backed dress, like the one she was wearing — through traffic of black men on bicycles and women with bundles on their heads that was familiar footage from television news.

When their delight in each other brimmed and its energies turned outwards, they liked to go fishing. The old car borrowed from Katya tackled tracks tunnelled beside the Loup; they shared the modest opportunities of a catch with young husbands in caps given away at petrol stations, old fellows with wives who knitted and minded paper bags holding bait, bread and wine; and all were startled together by the descent of wandering bands of hoarse teenagers who pushed one another about, splashed and went away, leaving the shuddering markings of light and shade to settle again on figures and water, working them over in a way that broke up limits and made one single state of being for a whole summer afternoon.

They looked at paintings. — In Africa, one goes to see the people. In Europe, it’s pictures.—

But she was seeing in Bonnard canvases past which they were being moved as if processed by the crowd, a confirmation of the experience running within her. The people she was living among, the way of apprehending, of being alive, at the river, were coexistent with the life fixed by the painter’s vision. And how could that be? — When you look at a painting, it’s something that’s over, isn’t it? — it’s a record of what’s already passed through the painter’s mind, both the event of seeing and the concept that arises from it — the imagining — are fixed in paint. So a picture is always abstract, to me — the style of painting hasn’t much to do with it. But when Katya and I go and lie under the olive trees…even my room, you know, the room she gave me — the flowers in a jar on the floor, and his flowers, this bouquet of mimosa… These pictures are proof of something. It is the people I’m living among I’m seeing, not the pictures.—

— And do you know why, my darling? This woman here stepping through the leaves, and this mimosa — the woman he painted in eighteen-ninety-four (look in the catalogue, it’s written), the mimosa in ‘45 during the war, during the Occupation, yes? All right. In the fifty years between the two paintings, there was the growth of fascism, two wars — the Occupation — And for Bonnard it is as if nothing’s happened. Nothing. Look at them… He could have painted them the same summer, the same day. And that’s how they are, those ones up there round the château — that’s how they live. It’s as if nothing has ever happened — to them, or anybody. Or is happening. Anywhere. No prisoners in Soviet asylums, no South Africa…no migrant workers living without women just down the road…no ‘place of protection’ at Arène — right under our noses, over there in Marseilles — already this year seven thousand poor devils have been locked up there like stray animals before they’re deported… To be alive day by day: the same as in Bonnard — tout voir pour la premiere fois, à la fois. Until the age of eighty. Oh that’s charming…of course, if you can manage it. Look here — and there — the woman’s flesh and the leaves round her are so beautiful and they are equal manifestations. Because she hasn’t any existence any more than the leaves have, outside this lovely forest where they are. No past, no future. The mimosa: fifty years later, it’s alive in the same summer as she is. There hasn’t been any Hitler, concentration camps — The slow-moving surge of people in holiday clothes pushed them away out of the galleries to the shallow steps and down to a courtyard of sculptured figures elongated as late shadows. His muscular legs with their shining straight black hair, and his pale European hands with the thin gold ring of his family status shone softly in the shade. — no bombings, no German occupation. Your forest girl and the vase of mimosa — c’est un paradis inventé.—

They were both wearing shorts and as they strolled his leg brushed hers like the weaving of an affectionate cat.

— If I did come to Paris—

— You will come, you will come — He went ahead along a narrow path under pinkish-blue-trunked pine trees, putting out a hand to lead her behind him.

— I can’t imagine how it would be — work out. How I would see you.—

— As you are seeing me now. Every day.—

— I’d be — where?—

— Some nice little hotel. Near the lycée. So that I can come quickly to you. I want first to show you la dame à la licorne in the Cluny.—

— You will arrange treats for me.—

— What is that?—

— When you take children out to amuse them.—

— Ah no. I love her, I can’t let you go any longer without knowing you have seen her too.—

Rosa leant beside him on a stone wall, looking on slopes with vineyards spread out to ripen in the sun and olive trees stooped along abandoned terracing broken by old farmhouses and new villas. A shirtless man was tiptoeing across a tiled roof he was repairing; a woman’s arms and stance were those of someone yelling up at him, although she was too far away to be heard. Farther still, on the strip of sea threaded behind the sandcastle towers, flags and belfries of hill-top villages, a ship like a spouting whale sent up white smoke. She followed the woman stepping back and back to see the man on the roof as if completing a figure that was leading to a tapestry on a museum wall from a room in an hotel that would be particular among streets of such hotels. Her chin was lifted and she was smiling, grimacing with lips pressed together in some shy and awkward mastery. Bernard saw the man on the roof;—The belly he’s got on him. Il va se casser la gueule, vieux con… Maybe even a little apartment. It’s not easy, but I have a few ideas. I know just what you’d like — a little studio in an old building…but usually they are stinking…the passages…you can’t imagine. No, we’ll find something better. — He no longer saw the man on the roof, the woman, the valley; eyes were drawn as if against glare, against thoughts in the language where she could not follow him. — Mind you, an hotel — then there’s always the concierge, if you need anything and I’m not — The long mouth with the thin upper line reacted with sadness and shrewd obstinacy to objections she did not know about; the steady eyes came to a warm, assuring focus, denying them. — I’m absolutely sure something can be done through the right people. The anti-apartheid committee can get you temporary residence and even a work permit. If not for you, then who the hell? But discreetly… Though of course they’d love to have you on a platform, Rosa, you can believe it… And we could get that film of your father, it would be — but no, of course not, not until you have French papers. They’d jump at the idea of you — probably they’ll make a job for you right away. And there are my contacts. Not bad. Quite a few black academics who have influence in French-speaking African countries they come from — There are so many projects and never enough people to go. It’s possible you could get a job doing wonderful work, medical training in Cameroun or Brazzaville, somewhere like that — I’ve many times been offered a lectureship at one of those black universities there, a year’s contract, there wouldn’t be any question of moving the family.—