Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

I wanted to go and she wanted to keep me with her in case the woman I had met in the street took possession of her again. I came flying up the hill to look for you singing while you upholster an old chair or paint a brave coat of red on your toenails. I wanted to ask who she was and tell you what happened. But when I saw you, Katya, I said nothing. It might happen to you. When I am gone. Someday. When I am in Paris, or in Cameroun picking up things that take my fancy, the mementoes I shall acquire.

The prospects: what are the prospects? For Burger’s first wife, Ugo Bagnelli’s mistress, for Rosa Burger.

You have your nightingales every May and the breasts that gave such sweet pleasure are palpated clinically every three months in the routine of prolonging life. The bed Ugo Bagnelli came to when he could get away from his family in Toulon — I sleep in it with Bernard, now — will not be filled with another man of yours. As Gaby Grosbois says, there could only be an arrangement, one pays for the hotel room oneself, like Pierre’s dentist’s wife and the policeman. And dear old Pierre in his blue Levis — it does not worry his wife that he might still find you desirable; there’s nothing for it but to make a joke between you of his impotence. You laugh at her when she says ‘You have still a beauty, Katya’; today I saw you in the good light that’s only to be found in the bathroom, of the dim rooms in this house I wish I could stay in for the rest of my life — I’ve seen you plucking bristles from your chin.

It’s possible to live within the ambit of a person not a country. Paris, Cameroun, Brazzaville; home. There’s the possibility with Chabalier, my Chabalier. He tells me that once installed in Paris, I’ll have my Chabalier who is the only one who counts. He’s not disloyal. He doesn’t say he doesn’t love his wife and children; ‘I live among them, not with them’. We don’t say ritual words between us; I don’t want to use the ones I had to use to establish bona fides for a prison. How is it he knew that — he was somehow recognizing that, in his distaste for going through the motions of flirtation the first night in the bar.

‘I have to satisfy her sometimes.’

I have asked him outright: you will have to make love to her when you go home. We knew I meant not only when he goes home from here, but when I am living ‘near by’ the lycée and he has been with me. He never lies; and mine was a question only a foreign woman would ask, surely. I realize that. I feel no jealousy although I have seen her photograph — she was on one he showed me when I asked to see his children. She is a pretty woman with a pert, determined head whom I can imagine saying, as you told me Ugo’s wife did: You can have as many women as you like so long as you don’t bring them into my home and I don’t know about them. — An indestructible bourgeoise — you said of Ugo’s wife, and you laughed generously, Katya. — That was good. I didn’t want to destroy anyone; I didn’t want anything of hers. — And you had your Bagnelli for more than fifteen years. Bobby had her Colonel. It’s possible.

We could even have a child. — You’re the kind of woman who can do that — He’s said it to me. — I wouldn’t be afraid to let us have a child. I don’t agree in general with the idea that a girl should go ahead and have a child just because she wants to show she doesn’t need a husband — like showing one can get a degree. It’s no easier than it ever was. A child without a family, brothers and sisters… But ours. A boy for your father.—

When I’m middle-aged I’ll have with me a young son at the Lycée Louis le Grand named after Lionel Burger; he would have no need to claim the name of the Chabalier children. We have kin in Paris, my child and I: I think sometimes of looking her up one day when I’m living there, cousin Marie who promotes oranges. In Paris there will be no reason to avoid anyone once I have new papers. Free to talk. Free. If I should meet Madame Chabalier accompanying her husband at one of the left-wing gatherings? — It doesn’t matter. You will probably like each other. You’ll chat like you do with anyone else who has political ideas more or less in common…that’s all. She tries to keep up. — He scoops the soggy slice of lemon out of my glass when he’s eaten his own, and sucks that. — You haven’t done her any harm.—

I don’t want to know more about her; don’t want to know her weaknesses or calculate them. What I have is not for her; he gives me to understand she would not know what to do with it; it’s not her fault. — One is married and there is nothing to be done. — Yet he has said to me, I would marry you if I could, meaning: I want very much to marry you. I offended him a bit by not being moved. It’s other things he’s said that are the text I’m living by. I really do not know if I want any form of public statement, status, code; such as marriage. There’s nothing more private and personal than the life of a mistress, is there? Outwardly, no one even knows we are responsible to each other. Bernard Chabalier’s mistress isn’t Lionel Burger’s daughter; she’s certainly not accountable to the Future, she can go off and do good works in Cameroun or contemplate the unicorn in the tapestry forest. ‘This is the creature that has never been’—he told me a line of poetry about that unicorn, translated from German. A mythical creature. Un paradis inventé.

When I saw you plucking the cruel beard from your soft chin, I should have come to you and kissed you and put my arms around you against the prospect of decay and death.

After a short trip to Corsica in pursuit of research for his thesis, Bernard Chabalier put his mind to discovering some sound reason why he should need to go to London, as well. He was good at this; extremely skilful and practised, beginning by convincing himself. Once this test was made — his face that habitually flickered with ironic scepticism and amusement at doubtful propositions accepted this one as passable — he was confident he could convince whoever was necessary. — I ought to spend a few days in London to talk to a British colleague — yes, of course the LSE — he’s doing the same sort of research. The influence of the counter-emigration in Britain. Not bad, ‘Counter-emigration’. I think I’ve invented it. The settlers who returned from Kenya, the Rhodesians who have been slipping back since UDI, Pakistanis, that goes without saying, West Indians. As a comparison: a short chapter for purposes of comparison. The mutation of post-colonial Anglo-Saxon values as against… Such things are good for a thesis. Erudite touches. Impress the monitors. — These points would scarcely need to be led before his wife (Christine is her name) and his mother for whom the demands of the thesis come before everything. — If sitting on top of a pillar in the middle of the desert was the best way to get my doctorate, they would send me, no mercy, a bottle of Evian to make sure if I was dying of thirst I wouldn’t drink water with germs. Ambitious for me, oh, I can tell you! They make sacrifices themselves, it’s true…—

Four days and three nights together in Corsica had given Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier a taste of the experience of being alone, a couple in the pure state, the incomparable experience they were in no danger of losing in the attempt at indefinite prolongation that is marriage. But the joy without demands — because the night-and-day presence of the other, sensation and rhythm of breathing, smell, touch, voice, sight of, interpenetration with was total provision — becomes in itself one single unifying demand. Of the couple; upon the world, upon time: to experience again that perfect equilibrium. A wild, strong, brazen, narrow-eyed resoluteness, cast in desire, treading on the fingers of restraint, knocking aside whatever makes the passage of the will improbable and even impossible. Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier would not have many opportunities to live together whole days followed by nights when their bodies kept vigil over one another in sleep like the side-by-side tomb effigies that stand for loving bodies left deserted by death. If days and nights are going to have to be counted on the fingers, the score is important. Rosa found London a brilliant idea because ideas in this urgent context have only to be practicable to be brilliant. She herself had some complementary to his essential basic one, the reason for him to go to London. A hotel was risky; no matter how obscure, someone who knew him or her might be staying there; after all, there are many reasons for seeking obscurity. A flat was available to her — a key to a flat in Holland Park was always available to her, she had never used it. Never been to England, to London — was Holland Park all right? Bernard was charmed by the idea of showing the jeune anglaise (French people in the village where he had met her made no fine distinctions of origin between English-speaking foreigners) round London. Holland Park was ideal! A short ride on the Underground to the West End.