Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  I took her away from the street that exposed through folds of blue nylon the dangle of dark nipples at the end of two flaps of skin. The door to a little house—Lou Souliou in wrought-iron script—stood open behind her. I offered to help her dress or get back to bed (supposing she had been in bed; she couldn’t say). But as soon as we were inside she began to chatter with matter-of-fact, everyday animation. We did not mention what had happened in the street. She put on something that looked more like an old velvet evening coat than a dressing-gown. She offered me coffee—or vodka ? There should be a bottle of vodka in the fridge, and some tomato juice? When she heard my French pidgin she answered in English with a formal American turn of phrase like a character out of Henry James. Photographs and mementoes in a dim, cosy room—like all the houses where women live around here. A free-range life; some of the things looked Peruvian, Mexican—American Indian. The Provençal panetière with books and small treasures behind its wooden bars, the curlicued spindly desk—it was stacked with rolls of unopened newspapers.—You’re Arnys’ little friend, aren’t you ? That’s where we’ve met. Arnys loves young people—Bernard is Arnys’ little friend, but I suppose this must have been one of the women who have seen me in the bar so often this summer. When I come back another year they may even remember, your—Madame Bagnelli’s—girl, the great love of the Parisian professor who was writing a book.

  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...—

  F
our 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.

  How far from the London School of Economics ?

  Laughter and words capering—Ah that’s right off our route, we’ll never find that, don’t worry—But my colleague, now, he lives in Holland Park, he’s going to get me a room in the house of some friends, êh, it’s cheaper than staying in an hotel...and if there’s a phone-call (Rosa already understands the pause, the inference, old Madame Chabalier has had an ‘infarctus’—heart attack—twice, and there must always be a means of reaching her son) there’s nothing remarkable about someone else in the house having answered the phone, no ?—

  Yes. And yes again. Yes to everything, as what can’t be done begins to be achieved with the zest of practical solutions following step-by-step, carefully planned, because carelessness costs wounds, no one must be hurt if Bernard Chabalier and Rosa Burger are to remain intact and unreachable.

  On the 7th of September Bernard Chabalier assembled the type-written pages and hand-written notes scattered in coded disorder round the room where he had worked and made love, both well—he paused to grant it; a remarkable witness, that room he would not wish to be confronted with again, under changed circumstances, ever—and went back to Paris. It was one week before the re-opening of the lycée where he was, like all French schoolmasters, a professor. That was reasonable enough. It was one week before the re-opening of his children’s schools; that was the reason. He could return one day and walk into his classrooms the next—he had taught what was to be taught many times, but his own children liked him to go along when pencils and exercise-books and new shoes were to be bought in preparation for the school year. He had talked to Rosa about his awareness that he did not know, beyond a certain elementary level, how one would have to behave to be what he called a ‘continuing’ father, equal to needs one would have to divine; for the present he simply did what seemed to please the children most obviously ? He did not tell her that the date he and she agreed upon for his departure was a specific instance. That was the sort of thing she had, would have to divine in the kind of life he and she were living and going to live; no need to lift the fact clear of supposition that a ‘professor’ needs a week to assume that identity. Loving the girl, anywhere outside the pure state, the principle that no one must be wounded reversed her position from possible perpetrator to possible victim. If nothing were said, and yet she understood why he was committed to himself to leave on that day, this would be another of the unspoken facts that would graft Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier closely upon one another.

  He left on a day that denied the date on the airline ticket. Holiday crowds had gone but the ancient stone bones of the village held the marrow of summer. The blue of the sea, triumphant over its pollution, was solid. By contrast the mountains powdered away into delicate haloes of sun-gauze; no memory of snow, it would never come back. From Madame Bagnelli’s car, a smell of geraniums through the windows instead of petrol fumes, and the old men playing their ball-game under the olive trees in the parking ground empty of cars, as Rosa saw him doing there when he grew old. She drove, and perhaps her concentration (still not able to trust her reflexes to keep to the right side of the road instead of the left—which was the rule where she came from) held at bay the desperation that attacked him, so that beside her his hands shook and he breathed with open mouth.

  But he was coming to meet her in London in a few weeks. In the meantime he would look for the small apartment for her in Paris in the quartier of the lycée; she would go to London and install herself, waiting for him, in the flat that was available to her always. He would take a week’s leave—he had not had a day’s sick- or study-leave in ten years, he did not care a damn if the term had only just begun—and then they would come back to Paris on the same day, if not the same plane, which is to say, together. It was no parting; it was the beginning of commitment to being exactly that: together. They were no longer one of the affairs of the village. He would telephone her every day; once again, they discussed the best times —she, too, was very good at the connivance of privacies. She did not cry but he was in awe of all she had known in order to learn not to weep; and could not unlearn. It took over again, now; but suddenly she turned from her tight little profile as the angle of a mirror is changed to present full-face and the big calm lips and eyes the colour of the lining of black mussel shells (it had taken him weeks, more than somewhat influenced by the surroundings in which he moved with her and even—at last!—he acknowledged himself as an example of the French preoccupation—the things they ate, to decide the colour).—You are the only man I’ve loved that I’ve made love with. So I feel you can make everything possible for me.—

  —What things ?—

  She took the tongue of ticket stuck out by the meter at the barrier to the airport parking ground, and did not react the moment the gate lifted. He watched her mouth with the passionate attention of the pleasures he found there. That jaw was almost ugly; she attempted as little to disguise the unbeautiful as to promote the beauties of her face. Her lips moved to find shapes for the plenitude struck from her rock—pleasure in herself, the innocent boastful confidence of being, the assurance of giving what will be received, accepted, without question. Before she drove on she tried.—I can’t say. Things I didn’t know about. I find out. Through you.—

  —Through me! Oh my darling, I can tell you—sometimes with you I feel I am that child sent out of the room while the adults talk, now grown-up—lived my whole life—out there...

  How much his turn of phrase delighted her! They laughed together at him, in Madame Bagnelli’s old car that brought them to a stop; to the destination of the day. Laughter became embraces and in a state of bold intoxication with each other, totally assuring, they parted, for a short while—less than two hours later, from Charles de Gaulle airport where he had just landed, Bernard Chabalier, having found some excuse to get away for a few minutes from whoever it was (Christine with or without children, aged mother) who had met him, telephoned Rosa Burger. He said it this time with blunt wonder: You are the dearest thing in the world to me. She cried in some unrecognized emotion, another aspect of joy; a strange experience.

  She left for London ten days later by train because this was the cheapest way. She had earned a little money practising her old healing profe
ssion on people to whom she had been recommended, at the yacht harbours; but the folder of traveller’s cheques she had brought to Europe was almost empty. She felt no particular concern. She had telephoned Flora Donaldson in Johannesburg and explained that after spending the summer in France she now wanted to visit London. A normal sort of itinerary for a holiday abroad; Flora, as Rosa knew she could expect of any one of her father’s associates and/or friends, asked no questions that would suggest anything otherwise and expressed no surprise at or reproach for his daughter having gone abroad without telling anyone of the intention, explaining in what possible manner it could have been realized, or saying goodbye to someone who regarded herself, with justification, as the closest of family friends, who had stood outside the prison door with the girl when she was fourteen and suffering her first period cramps. She did not tell Flora with whom she was staying or where, in France. Flora told her from whom to ask the flat key in Holland Park and found a way to indicate that if money were needed, that could be arranged too. Her voice sounded, out of the past, very close, and soprano with excitement as it always became at the prospect of involvement with problems of evasion and intrigue. Rosa found a way to thank her but explain money was not needed. Flora Donaldson suddenly began to ring out as if she could not be heard properly:—But how are you ? How are you ? Really all right ? How are you ?—