Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  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?

  —Of course one shouldn’t overlook that Solzhenitsyn’s basic pessimism has always made him a plebeian rather than a socialist writer—

  —But how will we change the world without Marx?—(The engineer admitted as if smilingly confessing to have been a football first-leaguer, although his build wouldn’t credit it:—I was out in the streets in ’68.—)—They do still agree it must be changed.—

  —I wonder. Hardly. Even that. What have they between their legs, never mind in their heads. Political philosophers... They’ll capitulate entirely to individualism. Or get religion. Either way, they’ll end up with the Right.—

  —Well, for a start, we must disown Marx’s eldest child. La fille aînée. We must declare the Soviet Union heretic to socialism.—Bernard Chabalier joined the group; she heard the interjection among others. He had the elliptical gestures of one who has slipped back into the shoal.

  —No, no, let’s be clear: there’s a distinction between the anti-sovietism of the right and the new anti-sovietism of the Leftist intellectuals. The Left now may seem to define the evils of Soviet socialism just as reactionary thought always did: pitiless dictatorship over forced labour. But what they condemn isn’t the difference between Soviet socialism and Western liberalism—which is roughly speaking the thesis of Western liberalism and even of the enlightened Right—that’s true in England ?

  —M—y-es, I suppose one could say we believe we know what human rights we stand for but we don’t want nationalization and unrestricted immigration of blacks. That’s why the Labour Party’s going to come to grief.—The French laughed with the guest of honour this time and he tailed off into vague assenting, dissimulating, scornful umphs and murmurs that dissociated him from that particular political folly.

  —Neither is it the orthodox apologist thesis that what’s happened to socialism in the Soviet Union has something to do with a legacy of Russian backwardness—that old stuff: her state of underdevelopment when her revolution came, the economic set-back of the war, the autocratic tradition of the Russian people and so on. The Left’s theory is that if Stalin was contained in Marx, it’s because the cult of the state and la rationalité sociale already were contained in Western thought—it’s this that has infected socialism. The phenomenon of Gulag arose in the Soviet Union; but its doctrine comes from Machiavelli and Descartes—

  The distinctively-modelled forehead with the fuzz of hair behind each ear tipped back, the lids dropped, intensifying the gaze.—So all that’s wrong with socialism is what’s wrong with the West. The fault of capitalism again—

  —Let me finish—therefore the anti-sovietism of the Western Leftists is an anti-sovietism of the Left, quite different.—

  —and let me tell you—Bernard burst through the hoop of his own irony—it’s the tragedy of the Left that it can still believe all that’s wrong with socialism is the West. Our tragedy as Leftists, the tragedy of our age. Socialism is the horizon of the world, Sartre has said it once and for all—but it’s a blackout...close your eyes, hold your nose rather than admit where the stink is coming from.—

  —The important thing surely is—

  The architect’s voice ran up and down themes that pleased him: —I wish I could arrange my convictions with the genius of a new philosophe...and they talk about Manichean...t
hey accuse Giscard...—

  —Surely the important factor is—the Englishman had drawn up his belly and lifted his chest, holding his opinions above argument—...at least these fellows may have the sense to have done with total ideas and the total repression indivisible from such ideas. When you get someone saying the twentieth century’s great invention may turn out to be the concentration camp...when you start coming out with thoughts like that, we may be getting away at last from the lure of the evil utopia. If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.—

  Bernard saw her, Rosa, looking at them all, at himself as one of them. Her cheekbones were taut with amazement; her presence went among them like an arm backing them away from something lost and trampled underfoot.—‘You can’t institutionalize happiness’? —In all seriousness? As a discovery...? It’s something from a Christmas cracker motto...—

  The architect was charmingly quick-witted.—Perhaps they meant freedom, somehow they‘re—I don’t know—a bit too shaken these days to use the word. In the Leftist view of life, anyway, the two are as one, more or less, aren’t they, they’re always insisting their ‘freedom’ is the condition of happiness.—

  She weighed empty hands a moment—Bernard saw what was underfoot taken up and shown there—then hid fists behind her thighs.—Don’t you know ? There isn’t the possibility of happiness without institutions to protect it.—

  The Englishman smiled on a grille of tiny teeth holding a cigar. —God in heaven help us! And up goes the barbed wire, and who knows when you first discover which is the wrong side—

  —I’m not offering a theory. I’m talking about people who need to have rights—there—in a statute book, so that they can move about in their own country, decide what work they’ll do and what their children will learn at school. So that they can get onto a bus or walk in somewhere and order a cup of coffee.—

  —Oh well, ordinary civil rights. That’s hardly utopia. You don’t need a revolution for that.—

  —In some countries you do. People die for such things.—Bernard spoke aloud to himself.

  Rosa gave no sign of having heard him.—But the struggle for change is based on the idea that freedom exists, isn’t it ? That wild idea. People must be able to create institutions—institutions must evolve that will make it possible in practice. That utopia, it’s inside...without it, how can you...act?—The last word echoed among them as ‘live’, the one she had subconsciously substituted it for; there were sympathetic, embarrassed, appreciative changes in the faces, taking, amiably or as a reproach, a naive truth nevertheless granted.

  The Englishman set his profile as if for a resolute portrait.—The lies. The cruelty. Too much pain has come from it.—

  —But there’s no indemnity. You can’t be afraid to do good in case evil results.—As Rosa spoke, Katya paused in passing and put an arm round her; looked at them all a moment, basking in the reflection of a past defiance, an old veteran showing he can still snap to attention, and went on her way to sponge a stain of spilt wine off the bosom of her dress.—This terrible balcony of mine, it catches every drip.—

  The Englishman’s authority reared and wheeled. He took another pastis from Didier’s tray without being aware of the exchange of his empty glass for a full one.—Not a question of moral justification, we must get away from all that. The evil utopia—the monolithic state that’s all the utopian dream is capable of producing has taken over moral justification and made it the biggest lie of the lot.—

  —Yes, yes, exactly what they are saying—whether it’s the Communist Party or some giant multinational company, people are turning against huge, confining structures—

  —Our only hope lies in a dispassionate morality of technology, our creed must be, broadly speaking, ecological—always allowing the premise that man’s place is central—

  Bernard met Rosa in the thicket of the others’ self-absorption. —For them, it livens up a party.—

  She shrugged and imitated his gesture of puffing out the lower lip : for all of us. She gave a quick smile to him.

  They moved away as if they had no common destination, would separate and go to Didier’s bar or join the Grosbois faction where Darby was being egged on to growl out some story which brought down upon her such bombardments of laughter that Donna watched, annoyed. They moved measuredly, like a pair meeting by appointment to exchange a message under cover of the crowd. He suddenly began to speak.—There’s plenty you can do, Rosa. In Paris, in London, for that matter. Enough for a lifetime. If you must. But I begin to think—He stopped; the two moved slowly on. —Ah, my reasons are not theirs—

  He couldn’t have said what he did, anywhere else; not alone with her; the presence of the crowd made it possible, safe from any show of emotions let loose.—I want to say to you—you can’t enter someone else’s cause or salvation. Look at those idiots singing in the streets with shaved heads a few years ago... They won’t attain the Indian nirvana.—Her head was down, bent towards his low voice. They might have been murmuring some gossip about the group they had just quitted.—Oh I know, how can I compare...—He paused for her quick glance but it did not come.—The same with your father and the blacks—their freedom. You’ll excuse me for saying...the same with you and the blacks. It’s not open to you.—

  —Go on.—She held him to it in the knowledge that he might not be able to find the time and place where he would dare to speak again: a meeting away from the lovers Bernard and Rosa.

  —Not even you.—

  But he was afraid. He disappeared into thoughts in his own language and the surf of human company broke high all around them. The view of the sea from Donna’s terrace was paraded by red and blue and yellow sails of the local people’s tiny pleasure craft on a Saturday afternoon all tacking in and turning at the buoys that marked the limit of sheltered waters. He could see Corsica wavering through the distortion of distance.—I really feel like pushing off to Ajaccio. You know ? We ought to get the feeling of what’s going on there. The cellar the autonomists occupied when they killed those two gendarmes belongs to one of my pieds noirs. The French Algerians are making a fortune in Corsica. I’d like to talk to them.—

  —Was the rioting actually against them, or was it also against French rule—to put it the other way about, I mean was the choice of that particular man’s cellar deliberate ?—

  He took pleasure in explaining what interested her; in her practised understanding of the way things happen in events of that category.—Oh the two are closely connected, the moving in of settlers from Algeria is seen by the independence movement as part of France’s colonialist exploitation—when they got kicked out of Algeria, they came nearer home to another one of France’s poor ‘colonies’, though Corsica’s supposed to be part of metropolitan France... So it’s the same thing. The French Algerians represent Paris, to the Corsicans. They even reject Napoleon as some sort of sell-out: the great hero of the French, the assimilator. The Simeoni brothers who lead the independence movement have taken up Paoli as hero. Ever heard of Pascal Paoli ? In the eighteenth century he fought the French for an independent Corsica... It might be fascinating, for us now...and for my book. A popular revolt that’s actually within its scope—the riots are the most serious trouble there’s been in Corsica. Make a good chapter.—

  —It’ll be enough to take your mind off your stomach.—When lovers cannot touch, they tease each other instead.

  —We’ll fly. To hell with the ferry.—

  —I wanted to go on that lovely white ship.—

  —Good god, I don’t want you to see me vomiting...it’s not a lovely ship, my Rosa, it’s just a floating belly full of cars.—

  —When ? There’s no problem about visas, I suppose ? They’ll let me in ?—

  —You are in. I told you, it’s colonized, it’s France—


  He gripped her wrist where she leaned on her elbow, wrestling with their joy.

  Georges and Manolis joined them. Didier had put on an old Marlene Dietrich record and pulled up Tatsu from the cushions piled on the floor as in a stage harem. She did not grin and giggle when she danced; hers was another face. Manolis was letting Didier’s tango lead his eyes:—I was saying to Georges—beau, mais très ordinaire—

  Dancing, the Japanese girl’s face was as it has never been before, grave, dreamy, fully expectant, and I felt what she had wanted—one age, with her. Something is owed us. Young women, girls still. The capacity I feel, running down the sluiced alleys under flower-boxes to meet the man who tells me his flesh rises when his ears recognize the slither of my sandals, the flashes of bright feeling that buffet me at this point where I see the sea, the abundance for myself I sense in whiffs from behind the plastic ribbons of open kitchen doors and greetings from the street-cleaners paused for a glass of wine at the bar tabac. School comes out for lunch and a swirl and clatter of tiny children giddy round my legs, they clasp me anywhere that offers a hold, I dodge from this side to that like a goal-keeper, arms out...

  I see everything, everything, have to stop to stroke each cat taking up the pose of a Grimaldi lion on a doorstep. Or I go blindfold in the darkness of sensations I have just experienced, deaf to everything but a long dialectic of body and mind that continues within Bernard Chabalier and me even when we are not together. Suddenly a woman stood before me; the other day, a woman in a nightgown stopped me in one of these close streets that are the warren of my loving.—One of the old girls, the Lesbians or beauties from the nineteen thirties.—I thought for a moment it was Bobby there.

  She clutched me by the arm; the nerves in her fingers twitched like fleas. I saw that there were tears runnelling the creases of her neck. Help me, help me. I broke surface into her need with the cringe and bewilderment at the light of a time of day or night one doesn’t recognize. And that was what she herself inhabited: What time is it ? She wanted to know if she had just got up or was ready to go to bed; she had slipped the moorings of nights and days. When I asked what was wrong she searched my face, gaping tense, the lipstick staining up into the vertical folds breaking the lips’ outline: that was what was wrong—that she didn’t know, couldn’t remember what it was that was wrong.