John Berger: Lilac and Flag

John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time , was published in 1958, and since then his books have included the novel G. , which won the Booker Prize in 1972.

With Lilac and Flag (1990), Berger completed his peasant trilogy Into Their Labours , which also includes Pig Earth (1979) and Once in Europa (1987). His six volumes of essays include Keeping a Rendezvous (1991), The Sense of Sight (1985), and Ways of Seeing (1972).

In 1962 Berger left Britain permanently, and he now lives in a small village in the French Alps.

The hay

smelt of how

the sky loved the earth.

You were the pain in my ribs

aching

from the carts unloaded.

The dead

were filling a doorway

with the view beyond.

You were the house

the candle under the plum tree

and my eternity.

THREE BUTTERFLIES RISE from the field like white ash above a fire. Let my dead help me now. One of them reappears and, flying over the tall grass which I will soon have to scythe, alights on a blue flower and opens its wings. On each of her wings the same sign is printed in blackish grey — the grey of the first marks if you draw with a burnt stick on paper. I begin to think of Zsuzsa — or perhaps it is she who begins to think of me. A second butterfly comes down and covers the first; the second one is Sucus. The two of them, wings spread, quiver like four pages of a book open in the wind. Suddenly Sucus flies off. Let my dead help me now. Zsuzsa shuts her wings, slips off the scabious flower, and joins the other two butterflies to fly away over the tall grass which I will soon have to scythe. I have loved them all.

ZSUZSA LIVED IN a house on the hill behind the tanneries. They were tall, open buildings without walls and on each floor the hides were hung to dry in the salt wind that came off the sea. The hides, bulging a little in the wind, looked like giant bats suspended upside down and asleep. For years there had been talk of pulling down the old tanneries and building new ones elsewhere, further away from the coast. The plan had not been carried out because of a warning from the city health department. If the old sheds were destroyed, so the health department threatened, the million rats who lived and bred there would quit the hill and invade Troy. It was in these tanneries that Marius worked long ago, when many men still came back alive from the city.

On Rat Hill, Zsuzsa’s mother’s house was blue. Uncle Dima, who sometimes worked in the docks, had painted it with stolen paint, manufactured specially for swimming pools. A bright turquoise blue.

All we need now is the diving board! said Zsuzsa after he had finished painting the house.

A week later Uncle Dima was arrested when he and two of his friends tried to break the till of an all-night garage on the Trojan ring road.

Zsuzsa’s father had disappeared five years earlier, without a trace. On the roads between cities people often vanish. Here in the village men leave their wives and their children, but in the end there’s always news of them. Two years after Zsuzsa’s father had vanished without a trace, her mother came home one Sunday morning with Uncle Dima. Meet my fresh hide, she announced to her son, Naisi, and her two daughters.

The Blue House had two rooms. Compared to some of the neighbours’ shacks, it was a solid home. Its walls were made of concrete blocks, and its roof of tarpaulin, stolen from the American navy, was well tarred and held down by wooden batons.

Unlike her younger sister, Zsuzsa was skinny. Not just her wrists and ankles, but her shoulders, her chest, and hips.

She could slip between a door and its hinges, her mother complained.

People say bodies reveal character. They are wrong. Bodies are dealt out to us like cards. Character begins with how you play what you get. At nineteen Zsuzsa looked like a boy. Yet she was already more feminine than any wet nurse. This is what made her a law unto herself.

The first time she met Sucus was outside St. Joseph’s. St. Joseph’s was not a church but a prison, a large one which held two thousand prisoners. She had been to visit the uncle.

How do you feel, Uncle Dima?

How in God’s name do you think?

Bad?

Couldn’t be worse.

It’s sunny today.

Eleven fucking months. What have you brought me?

Meat pies, a pineapple, smoked cod’s liver.

Cod’s liver! God in heaven! Who but your mother would think of smoked cod’s liver?

Here are some cigarettes.

Zsuzsa, I want you to go and see Rico.

I hate that man, Uncle Dima.

Hate my friend?

Last time he tried to lay me.

Keep out of his reach, that’s all. I want you to go and see Rico and I want you to tell him: The truck’s ready.

Okay.

What’ll you tell him?

He can fetch the truck.

No! The truck’s ready.

Same thing.

Dear God, what did your mother do to deserve such an idiot of a daughter. The truck’s ready.

I’ll tell him, Uncle. Don’t worry. Someone has to fetch it, no?

Just tell him: The truck’s ready. He’ll understand.

I must be off.

Give me a kiss.

It’s not allowed here.

Give me your hand then.

Bye, Uncle.

Bye, Zsuzsa. Don’t forget.

The gatehouse to the prison, which was a hundred years old, was built in brick. Over the arch above the massive doors, which only opened for black vans bringing in and taking out prisoners, was a wooden panel on which the sign-writer had written STATE PENITENTIARY CORRECTIONAL CENTRE. Above these noble letters he had painted a pair of scales in gold. People on foot entered and left by a small door set, like a reprieve, within one of the large ones. Prison suppliers and undertakers used an electronic entrance to the modern wing, which was at another level, lower down the hill.

From the Champ-de-Mars, outside the main gate, you could see the docks, the district around the railway station known as Budapest, and the industrial area to the north, over which, during the dog days of summer when the sea was like a lake, there often hung a pall of yellowish smoke the colour of smoked haddock. On leaving the prison Zsuzsa came through the little door which was like a reprieve. Outside stood two soldiers.

Their heads turned with their eyes as Zsuzsa walked past. She was dressed in sandals, blue jeans, and a T-shirt with the words STANFORD UNIVERSITY written across it. They quizzed each letter of the unpronounceable words. The fingers of one drummed on the barrel of a submachine gun held in the crook of his arm.

Nice pair of lemons there!

I am an old woman, yet I still remember what it was like to pass by the gaze of men who wanted you — hatefully or beautifully. We give birth to monsters, to saints, and to everybody else who is neither one nor the other. To Jesus of Nazareth and to Herod. Every kind of good and evil comes out from between our legs, and when we are young, every kind of good and evil dreams of getting in there again.

The soldier knew Zsuzsa heard what he said by the change in the way she walked. Further off, some children were playing with a donkey. In the heavy heat the national flag hung limply from its flagstaff on the prison tower. A nice pair of little lemons!