Murmuring, up there, like schoolgirls under the bed-clothes. Laughter.
Once I was suspended from the Party for ‘inactivity’...when they gave something a name, I can tell you...it meant anything they decided. ‘From each according to his ability’...I was dancing in some bloody terrible revue six nights a week—can you believe it ? I had to—Lionel was an intern earning almost nothing, he walked the floor with the baby when he came home. But on Sundays I used to take my little street theatre group I’d got together out to the black townships on the back of a furniture remover’s lorry...oh baby and all. They had it in for me. I wouldn’t go to their old lectures on Marxist-Leninism-I could read it all for myself ?—no, you were supposed to sit there listening to them drone on. One poor devil, I forget her name—she was even accused of trying to poison the comrades by boiling water for tea in a suspect-looking can. One of the Trotskyites who was expelled...
What did he say?
I’ve never talked with anyone as I do with you, incontinently, femininely.
Dick was the only one... well, he didn’t exactly defend me, how could anyone—I suppose I really wasn’t good material. But there was some sort of little (an amused pause, mutually culpable in the understanding of our sex)—something—going on at one time. Much later, during the war. I knew he really liked me. He thought I was an extraordinary creature... a few kisses managed in the most unlikely circumstances... oh innocent Dick. We despised the subjection of women to bourgeois morality but he was scared of Ivy and he had schoolboy feelings of honour and whatnot towards his comrade. He worshipped him. He once told me: Lionel will be our Lenin. I think—now yes, don’t let me lie, we actually slept together once. In Ivy’s bed ! Good god. Don’t strange things excite men ? Funnily enough, I remember the sheets. I’ve never forgotten her sheets. They were embroidered, chainstitch daisies and so on, bright pink and blue—she always wore such awful clothes ! She was away at some conference in Durban with Indians. We were supposed to be roneoing pamphlets. Sweet Dick. But compared with somebody like Lionel...the affair didn’t have much of a chance. It wasn’t exactly anything to worry about. I can’t imagine what he’d look like now... his jacket always used to be hitched up on his bum, quite unaware of himself, I used to feel the giggles coming on...
What did he say?
You’ve never asked me why I came and I don’t ask that, either. You tell me anecdotes of your youth that could transform my own. Several times I could almost have exchanged in the same way an anecdote about how I used to dress up and visit my ‘fiancé’ in jail, wearing Aletta’s verloofring. I could imitate the way the warders talk, and you would laugh with the pleasure of the softened reminiscence. That’s exactly it!—the brutishness and guileless sentimentality of grandmother Marie Burger’s taal in their mouths. Of course I know what we’re like when there’s some little thing going on—when Didier gave me my chance, taking a toe for nipple or clitoris. What’d he say, your husband, when his dancing-girl was disciplined ? It must have seemed so petty to him—the blancoed shoes, your tears. Or maybe he saw this ideological spit-and-polish as essential training for the unquestioning acceptance of actions unquestioningly performed, the necessity of which was to come later. He may have smiled and consoled you by making love to you; but seen the faithful go ahead and discipline you because you preferred amateur theatricals to Marxist-Leninist education.
The little something going on with comrade Dick—what’d he say then ? Perhaps he didn’t notice. You deceived him because you were not of his calibre; it was your revenge for being lesser, poor girl, you were made fully conscious of your shortcomings by his not even noticing the sort of peccadilloes you’d console yourself with.
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 tig
htening 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.—
She turned to him for a verdict, proof of his own words—he would not understand.
—I have done nothing.—
—What could you have done ?—
—Ah, I can’t explain that—She looked indulgently round the bar at the young men like chorus girls touching at their hair and clothes in perpetual expectation of making an entrance, the old singer satisfying a sense of control over all she had lived by the resolution of the right card coming down.
—There are many things I could say you could’ve done. Girls in the streets of Paris like tourists with their tired feet and Guide bleu who are hijackers on the run. Little students with art nouveau tresses who have cocaine for sale in their satchels. Deputies dining at the Matignon—silver hair, manicured—Anne-Aymone talks gardening with them—who are selling arms to both sides in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, anywhere.—
—None of those.—He did not have a pullover knotted round his neck (a worn leather jacket had been put down on the bar stool beside him); he separated from the awareness in which a few common characteristics ran into one. A high forehead with distinct left and right lobes was almost a pate; thinning curly hair edged it against the light and straggled out in wings above and behind the ears. A wide thin mouth, with mobilities of muscle that modelled in the firm flesh around it expression more usually conveyed by lips.
—W-ell. There are also those who imagine they must have committed something, they feel they’re being followed. It’s all right.—The thick eyebrows that compensate men for losing their hair lifted with tolerance. The eyes had a trance-like steadiness, showing the arch of the eyelid rather low over the eyeball in a hollow of bone.
—I don’t imagine. There’s nothing either neurotic or mysterious—She had a need to be plain; as he had said, to make oneself ‘an exhibit’ was not acceptable.—If you are followed by policemen you get used to it, so do they. You know whether they fall asleep waiting for you and whether they slip away at regular times for a beer. I’ve known them since I was a child. But in a foreign town, it wouldn’t have been so easy to recognize one. I don’t know the sort of person who’d do the work, here—the kind of clothes, the haircut—
She gave up, smiling.
—If you don’t live like that—haven’t... And here—even I—if one isn’t living like that—
He was looking at her with detached respect.—You’ve been in trouble. All right. I told you, it’s impossible... I know about it but I haven’t been in it.—
—First of all, I don’t think of it like that—as ‘trouble’—
—No of course not. You see ? It’s less and less possible for me. When I said we wouldn’t understand each other I didn’t think it would be something like this. I was thinking only we wouldn’t admit why I said come and why you came. About the things between men and women. You attract me very much—you know it, and you answer it by leaving the others, with me. Perhaps you haven’t found a man you want among all those who must have shown themselves interested ?—Oh yes. But you couldn’t tell me... And how would you understand about me. I am eating the food and drinking the wine of friends I don’t think much of, living on them...and perhaps I also think a new girl is part of my little sabbatical...I don’t know. You know that I’m a teacher. ‘Professor’—we were introduced yes, but names... Every Frenchman who teaches in a lycée is a professor, every German is Herr Doktor. The people I’m staying with will tell you I’m writing a book—in their house, it’s a wonderful process to them. Would I tell you it’s my old Ph. D. thesis I entered myself for at the Sorbonne three years ago and that I hope maybe—maybe—someone will publish it if it is ever finished.—
—You can tell me.—She could laugh, unembarrassed. She put out a hand, tendons spoked widely on the back, and felt down round the spiral of the olive-press pillar she had followed with her eyes when she had been with other people.
A woman’s voice recorded thirty years before was singing about the island where she and Napoleon’s Josephine were born. He had fished the slice of lemon out of the bottom of his glass and was gobbling the skin with a mouth drawn by the zest.—A pig. Excuse me, I love it.—Do you know what that is ? That’s Arnys singing—unmistakable. She was the best of the lot. Like some voice coming up from the street when you’re falling asleep or not really awake yet.—
Rosa leaned to whisper and was touched by the springy hair behind his ear, smelled him for the first time.—That’s Arnys there. It’s her bar.—
—Ah no.—
—People keep on telling me. It doesn’t mean much to me.—He was looking at the old woman in some kind of partisan pride and bravado at endurance.—You chose Arnys’ bar. Something like that happens...—He swung down from his stool and was over to the old woman; she looked up, mout
h parted girlishly as in the photographs on the walls. He spoke low and fast in French. She growled an uncertain Monsieur ?—a bass note with snapped strings. And then one of those extraordinary bursts of French animation broke out. They protested to each other, they talked both at once, lifting faces like birds challenging beaks, Arnys half-closed her eyes, they laid hands upon one another, Professor Bernard Chabalier repeating with reverent formality, chère madame, Josette Arnys, Josette Arnys. Her dog struggled under her arm to get at him or be let down.
He came back laughing privately past amiable glances; he might have been showing himself appreciative of any other local landmark. —Very modest—d‘you know what she says ?—she told me there will never be anyone like her. ‘This whole feminist thing’ means women won’t be able to sing about love any more, they’ll be ashamed. So I said but the island song, it’s not about love, at least not that kind of love, it’s about origins, it was even romantically political, êh, in advance of its time (I didn’t say that to her)—the Antilles, the hankering of Europe for a particular humanism it believes to flourish in a creole world ? But she says the real source of song remains only one—look at the birds, who can sing only because they must call for a mate.—
—Hadn’t you ever seen her before ?—
—Where would I see her ? In Paris nightclubs when I was a kid ? We have some old records at home—my wife’s family is the kind that never throws anything away—we play them once a year or so, when there is a party, you know, like tonight—everybody drinks too much wine and jumps round... Are you working tomorrow?—
—I’m not working.—
—Oh god, I will have to drive myself. The whole year I say: if I could get away from the flat, children, committees, Sunday lunches, everybody, if I could have three weeks, that’s all. And now I’m alone with my thesis I’m always talking too much about. The whole summer has been arranged around me, my wife and children given up their holiday, even my mother writing me letters saying don’t reply, you are too busy concentrating.—He drew back from himself. —Do people like you have holidays ? Can you say, arrête. Set a date for the rentrée.—
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