Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

They had taken on without thinking one of the ancient groupings of the couple; found a place in the grass where she folded her legs beneath her and he laid his head against her belly, feeling it shake when she laughed and hearing the muffled questioning sounds of her gut as a child of his in her would. — I’ll come alone. We’d have a whole year.—

— I was talking with the dear boys before you came to Arnys’ yesterday. They were consulting their horoscopes in Marie-Claire . Very serious. You know, I just found I had the words, I could put them together without thinking — The face turned up to hers was the face he must have had ten years earlier, a face to be curious about, smoothed like a piece of paper under the heel of a hand, unmarked by lines of ambitious anxiety, and as it was before the chin-crevice was deepened by sensual intelligence. — Oh your French will be fine. You’ll manage perfectly all right. Maybe in Africa I’ll even finish my bloody book. Ah, that’s very good: one of the reasons for my taking the job after all will be that it’s necessary to go back to colonial sources and so on.—

All practical matters were open between them; a wife and two children, a responsibility assumed long ago by a responsible man. The attitude on which Bernard and Rosa’s acceptance of this circumstance rested was based on one of the simple statements of a complex man — I live among my wife and children — not with them.—

The statement, in turn, seemed to seek an explanation from Rosa she could not give; but in the saying, the burden of it was shifted a little, her shoulder went under it beside his. They had no home but he was living very much with her. The security was almost palpable for him in the vigour and repose of her small body. Resting there, he gained what she had once and many times at the touch-line of her father’s chest, warm and sounding with the beat of his heart, in chlorinated water. Her eyes (the colour of light, creating unease; Boer eyes, pied-noir eyes?) — moved above his head among trees, passers-by and — quick glance down — in a private motivation of inner vision as alert and dissimulating as the gaze her mother had been equally unaware of, looking up to see the daughter coming slowly over the gravel from the visit to her ‘fiancé’ in prison.

The young smooth face spoke out beneath hers; from what he had been and what he was — You are the dearest thing in the world to me.—

At gatherings they lost each other in the generality and then would become aware, near by, of the back of a head or a voice: she heard a slightly different version of Bernard Chabalier giving a slightly different version of what he had said about the painter. — fifty years, fauvism, futurism, cubism, abstract art — for him everything passes as nothing. 1945 is 1895. Maybe what is complete is timeless…but events change the consciousness of the world, it shakes and the shocks register seismographically in movements in art—

Donna was obliged to entertain an English friend who was the property of her family — the sort of single example, culled by them from the politico-intellectual circles whose existence they ignore, that is the pride of a rich family. He would take himself at their valuation of his distinction. He would expect to have a party given for him; Donna had had to round up, among the usual people she knew, a few that he would feel were on a level to appreciate him. Her explanation of what he was or rather did was unsure; had been a member of parliament, something to do with the fuss over Britain’s entry into the Common Market, something to do with editing a journal. She couldn’t remember how good his French was; the Grosbois, the Lesbians from the brocanterie and other people of her local French contingent collected in one part of her terrace, happy to make their own familiar party, anyway; Didier in an exquisite white Italian suit (only Manolis recognized pure raw silk) asserted his own kind of distinction while moving about swiftly serving drinks in the preoccupied detachment of someone hired for the occasion. His contribution to proper appreciation of the guest of honour was instinctively to take on a role in keeping with the position of Donna as the host of James Chelmsford. Chelmsford himself was got up in shirt-sleeves, blue linen trousers, espadrilles showing thick, pallid blue-veined ankles, yellow Liberty scarf under a shinily-shaven red face, drinking pastis; making it clear he was no newcomer to this part of the world. Donna shepherded round him a little group that included Rosa. It attracted one or two others who had opinions to solicit as an opening to giving their own — a journalist from Paris who was someone else’s house-guest, a constructional engineer from the Société des Grands Travaux de Marseille.

— Why has it taken Solzhenitsyn to disillusion people with Marx? Others’ve come out of the Soviet Union with the same kind of testimony. His Gulag isn’t something we didn’t all know about—

Chelmsford was listening to the journalist with an air of professional attention. — Well, for that matter of course, one might ask how since the Moscow trials—

— No, no — because they belong to the Stalinist period and the Left makes a strong distinction between what died with Stalin, that’s the bad old days… But dating from the new era — post-Khrushchev — the thaw, the freeze again — everyone’s been aware the same old horrors were going on, hospitals the latest kind of prison camp, new names for the old terror, that’s all. Why should Solzhenitsyn rouse people?—

— But has he?—

The journalist gave the architect the smile for someone of no opinion. He addressed his reaction to the others. — Oh without question — after that creature so tortured, so damaged — who could meet his eyes on television, sitting there at home on a Roche-Bobois chair with a whisky in your hand. I know that I…that face that looks as if it has been hit — slapped, êh? — so that the cheeks have no feeling any more and the mouth that makes itself (he drew up his own shoulders, shook his clenched hands, and bunched his mouth until the lips whitened) — that mouth that makes itself so small from the habitude of not being allowed to speak freely. The Western Leftists don’t know how to go on believing. They don’t know what to defend in Marx, after him.—

— It’s not easy to answer. — The engineer spoke up friendlily to Rosa as if for them both; he had the scrupulously tolerant manner of some new kind of missionary, his feet in sensible sandals, his blond head almost completely shaven for coolness in the river-mouth swamps of Brazil and Africa where (he chatted to her) he prepared surveys of prospective harbour sites. — Perhaps it’s the approach, something in his style? The writing, I mean. Something Victor Hugoish that appeals to a wide public, much wider…—

— The public. The public in general were always ready to believe the Communists are nothing but beasts and monsters anyway — it’s the intellectual Left that’s rejecting Marx now—

— Well I doubt whether the same kind of thing can be said of England — but then I doubt whether we can be said to have an intellectual Left in the same sense. One could hardly put up Tony Crosland as a candidate among café philosophers… — The French didn’t understand the joke.

— And even rejecting Mao — you can’t ‘institutionalize happiness’ —from the same people who were the students in the streets in ’68!—

The journalist and the engineer singled each other out, constantly interrupted, above the heads of others. — No, it’s not quite true, Glucksmann attacks Solzhenitsyn for saying Stalin was already contained in Marx—

— We-ell, they put up some kind of half-hearted show… I mean, of course you don’t come out and say, I was wrong, we brilliant young somebodies, the new Sartres and Foucaults, our theories, our basic premises — blood and shit, that’s all that’s left of them in the Gulag, êh?