Burger's Daughter Read online

  A woman with gold tinsel hair in the sun leaned on a cane to let them pass, a middle-aged man spilling belly over jeans gestured with his pipe, the girl with a smile of oriental persistence held out of the car’s way a spaniel dancing about her on its lead: the driver waved to all without looking.—You’re in a room at the top, a lot of stairs to climb, I’m warning you—but there’s a terrace, the roof of the adjoining house actually but they let me fix it up. I thought you’d like to be able to step out when you wake up in the mornings. Sunbathe, do what you like. Get away from me or anyone, quite private. If you’d rather you can have the smaller room on the first floor ?—well, you’ll see...a jumble of a house like all the houses, the whole village’s a warren, every one’s built against the next, if my plumbing goes wrong you have to go to the neighbour’s to find the leak...you’ll see, you’ll just say if you’d rather come downstairs. But that room adjoins mine; I don’t mind, but you might... we could close off the door between us, of course. The top room used to be Bagnelli’s room, when he was home...I should tell you, he died four years ago. It was fifteen years. We never actually married, but everyone...—

  Suddenly the car braked, the forearm tanned with tea-leaf marks went out to stop Rosa from pitching forward.

  —Didn’t I tell you. So there you are! The day, the time, everything. Pure nerves. What a state Madame Bagnelli was in about your arrival. I had to dash after her with the eggs she left in the épicerie this morning. You don’t look too forbidding to me—A man’s voice with the precision of an English stage vicar, and a long, thick beardless face under a captain’s braided peak bent to the window.

  —Yes, safe and sound—Rosa Burger, Constance Darby-Littleton. Are you walking up the hill... ?—

  —Of course I want to walk. It’s my constitutional. I thought everyone was perfectly aware of my habits by now—Night-blue slits between puffy lids had no whites, no eyelashes, and moved from driver to passenger like mechanical eyes set in one of those anthropomorphic clock-faces. The car passed on at the level of matron’s breasts slung under a checked shirt.

  In a parking ground scooped out below trees a fat young Bacchus wearing cement-stained cowboy boots leapt from a pick-up loaded with broken tiles and window-frames.—Madame Bagnelli—Loud, indignant and laughing exchange; not necessary to understand the language adequately to be able to follow that this was workman and client taking up some long-standing wrangle.—He came around and couldn’t get in! Now isn’t that just too bad! How many days I’ve waited in for nothing! I won’t see him for another six weeks and after another dozen phone-calls. He’s supposed to put a floor in my cave—rather the junk-pit that’s hopefully going to be a cave. He gets whatever’s there.—The car was held on the clutch at the top of the spiral where the road forked at a broken city wall. The castle waved bright handkerchiefs of unidentified nations. The car announced itself with a gay warning blast, turning right. Greasy locks and a beautiful, lover’s face were approaching.—Madame Bagnelli —the man counted out three letters from his mail-bag and presented them to her; they thanked each other as if for the pleasure of it, using that language. Rosa Burger was presented by a new name with the accent on the final syllable: the friend—all the way from Africa!—who would be getting mail so addressed.

  The car swung past the postman into a steep little alley blocked by a studded double gate and she was about to get out to open it for the first time on a house where she was told she would sleep, up flights of stairs, a room with a terrace: for that moment, there was nothing behind that gate with its push-button bell and card under a plastic slot, Bagnelli.

  —What do I call you?—

  —Call me ?—

  —Do I call you Madame Bagnelli, or—(Colette was the name, ‘Colette Swan’. ‘Colette Burger’.)

  The woman pressed back from arms braced against the steering wheel; she relaxed suddenly, turned her head full on with an expression of sly voluptuous complicity, as if her hand closed on the shy, casual question as on some inert but electrified shape that came to life on contact.—Katya. You call me Katya.—

  On the gate there was a note under Scotch tape and a big dried sunflower like a dead burst star. MADAME BAGNELLI URGENT—exclamation mark scored within its outline. The gate dragged screeching across courtyard paving; the smell of stony damp and a perfume never smelled before; and then it brushed Rosa Burger’s face as the door was opened, the suitcase bumped through: lilac, real European lilac.

  —Dah-dah-dah-dah; dedah—well that can wait. Why the hell should I phone the moment I come in...—The note flew into a straw basket.—You want to go straight up ? No—let’s just dump everything. I’ve got a little (swimming colours, fronds blobbing out of focus and a sea horizon undulating in uneven panes of glass)—just a little something ready—the glass doors shook open, the new arrival was on a leafy shelf of sun, offered to the sea midway between sky and tumbling terraces of little dark trees decorated with oranges. She smelled cats and geranium. The elaborate toy villas of the dead in a steep cemetery took on their façades the light off the sea. She felt it on her cheeks and eyelids. She saw—saw a crack up a white urn that was a line of ants, a tiny boat like a fingernail scored across the sea, saw the varicose vein wriggling up behind the knee of the ex-dancer putting down the tray with the bottle of champagne in a bucket.

  They drank leaning together on the balustrade, great open spaces of the sea drawing away the farting stutter of motorcycles and gear-whine of trucks, music and voices wreathing their own, from other terraces and balconies. Now and then something came tinkling-clear to Rosa Burger: once a man’s sudden derisive laugh, the gobbling bark when a dog has a cat treed; a woman’s yell to stop someone driving off. These shattered lightly against her; her palm felt the still cold of the glass and her tongue the live cold of the wine. They sat in tilted chairs with their feet up on the balustrade among falls of geranium and ice-plant drowsy with big European bees in football stripes. The woman toed off the heel of each espadrille and ran the arch of her bare foot over the head and back of a Manx cat. (—Not mine but he likes me better than his owner.—) Out of her boots Rosa’s feet were released cramped and marked, her jeans were pushed up to the knee. The woman was telling the history of the village with the enjoyment of one who projects herself into the impression it must have for someone who has never seen anything like it before.—A nobility of robber barons, from the crusades to the casinos, a suzerainty—do I mean sovereignty—these weren’t kings—They laughed together in seraglio ease.—Feudal exploitation (these terms slipped in as an old soldier will use the few phrases he remembers from a foreign campaign, when he meets a native of that country) right up to the time of the French revolution. That big garden with the cypress and fig, here behind us, just below the castle, you must have noticed the trees as we drove—it was a monastery. My friend Gaby Grosbois’ house is part of the monks’ pig-sties. But after the revolution the new industrial entrepreneurs and businessmen bought up these church properties for nothing and used them as their country houses, they lived like the aristocrats. During our war the Resistance in this part of the country had its headquarters in the cellars. Oh you’ll hear all the tales, they love to have someone who hasn’t heard them before—everyone a hero of ‘the Resistance, if you want to believe...but a few years ago—Bagnelli was still alive, no; just after—it was going to be made into an hotel, some actor was interested in the investment. It came to nothing. Now it belongs to an arms dealer, not that they ever come here, no one sees them...the old Fenouil couple keep up the garden. The suzerain changes his nationality... Japanese are the ones buying up big properties here now; North Africans are the serfs making roads and living in their bidonville—squatters. And people like me (laughing)—we manage to survive in between.—Again and again, the cat slid under the high-arched foot.—I can imagine how you’ve been brought up (eyes closed and smiling face tilted back into the sun a moment)...here you forget about degrees of social usefulness—good god, nobody would understand w
hat on earth I’m talking about. But on the other hand I suppose you’ll be surprised at the way anybody will do anything; no question that what you do’s infra dig—Back and forth the cat raked by maroon-painted toenails.—I cook for Americans sometimes, in the summer —I know the kind of French food they like. Solvig pays me to vacuum her books and pack away her winter clothes once a year. She’s a friend, but she’s the widow of a big Norwegian publisher, she’s got money, and so... I look after the local hardware shop when the owner goes skiing for her two weeks every January. Cold little hole, selling toilet rolls and plastic dishes...when the French are concentrating on making money they make no attempt to be comfortable. Other friends, a Greek painter and his boy-friend—they take jobs at the race-course when the trotting season starts. But women aren’t hired. Oh I patch up old furniture—‘restore antiques’ —sounds better, eh. Sometimes I get a chance to give English lessons—I taught dancing at the Maison des Jeunes until I got so heavy the floorboards quaked.—

  —And your husband ? What was he ?—

  —Bagnelli ?—A long-drawn ah-h-h-h, amused, the touching on things that couldn’t be explained even in the easy lucidity of wine and fine weather, in half-an-hour’s understanding.—D’you know what he was when I met him—a captain in the French navy. In Toulon. But here, oh he did a lot of things up and down the coast, a wine agency, once it was motor-racing, a tin mine in Brazil—oh lord. And always yachts, yachts—he had shares in them, or was promised shares in them, he sailed them for other people, he even designed them—

  —I shared a cottage with someone who planned to go round the world. But to see a yacht being built in a backyard four hundred miles from the sea—

  —You ?—The smiling woman allowed herself to look at the girl as she had wanted to since she first settled recognition upon her at the airport.

  Dissolving in the wine and pleasure of scents, sights and sounds existing only in themselves, associated with nothing and nobody, Rosa Burger’s sense of herself was lazily objective. The sea, the softly throbbing blood in her hands lolling from the chair-arms, time as only the sundial of the wall’s advancing shadow, all lapped tidelessly without distinction of within or around her.—Like someone in prison. Everything it might do or be—but it couldn’t function. Locked. Landlocked.—

  —You never saw it launched ? When they slip into the sea—oh yes, it’s true, marvellous, it’s a coming to life—I used to cry—The woman produced liquid brilliance in her eyes, a past seductiveness. The carefully-oiled and tanned flesh between her breasts wrinkled shinily under the pressure of folded arms like a skin forming on cooling fatty liquid.—Tell me—did you know me ? Or—(the girl’s down-turned considering smile)—of course you saw I was the one who’d recognized who you were and so—I mean have you ever seen a photograph ?—

  —When I went through Lionel’s things. There were one or two taken in England and in Russia. Damn it—I should have brought them. The Soviet Union ones—one can recognize them at once, even if the background doesn’t give much indication. The same with those of my mother; you know Ivy Terblanche ? And Aletta ?—

  —Oh I knew them all, all of them. So long ago!—

  —My mother with Aletta on a railway station, holding flowers. You can see at once which are the Russian ones—you all look so exalted.—

  —Yes, yes.—A wailing laugh.—Like pop-star fans. Come. The last drop between us. Although it’s warm by now. Warm champagne makes you drunk.—She sat with her knees apart and her belly forgetfully rolling forward.—Moscow, Moscow, Moscow! I auditioned with the Maryinsky, you know. What a wonderful time we had. Too late, too old, nineteen or twenty, lazy already—but they took a fancy to us and what a time we had. Their parties went on all night; you breathe vodka like a dragon, after. I had to ask the maid in the hotel to change the pillow-cases—they gave back vodka fumes just from our breathing. We missed whole sessions of their bloody Congress; well, one whole session... Lionel—that father of yours—(a pause, genuine or assumed, of incredulity, looking at the girl lying in the chair) he gave them a most convincing yarn about having to sit up all night preparing papers for a committee, what a reputation for Party diligence but it started with a different kind of party... You look like him. In spite of the eyes. You wouldn’t be able to judge, because you think of him as he is—was. But then in Moscow...I see it while I look at you! You know, when you have lived with different men, lived a long time, like me, you’d be surprised, you forget what they really were like. When I wrote to you when he died, it was a public figure that I... looking at you I see that: because here he is as he really was, in Moscow. Like your father... but I think—I should say, after being with you for exactly —what ?—one-and-a-half hours—after this long acquaintance, my dear Rosa, I would say you are more your mother. Yes. I didn’t know her well—although in the Party we all ‘slept in each other’s underwear’ (I’ll never forget: someone once shocked us stiff by telling us that, someone who’d been expelled, naturally—I’ll never forget the blasphemy against the comrades !). How could I know her well—anyway, she was so young. It must have been round about 1941. Your mother was simply—at once—my idea of a revolutionary. —

  She was looking at her daughter, the girl smiling, fending off with a languid fascination the play of attention that quickly shifted again.

  —Me in a cloche hat ? Down to my eyebrows ? Oh my god—The body squatted, spread-kneed, as if on the lavatory; nowhere to be found in this woman the marmoset face showing itself out of fur hat and fur collar, the slim pointed shoes lined up beside Lionel Burger’s outside the hotel bedroom. Laughter and chatter trailing behind or bursting ahead, the solid, over-blown figure came and went, preparing food, between rooms vague and dark with objects not yet seen as more than shapes, and the radiance, the sweet hum of the village, on the terrace. The innocence and security of being open to lives all around was the emotion to which champagne and more wine, drunk with the meal, attached itself. All about Rosa Burger, screened only by traceries of green and the angles of houses, people sat eating or talking, fondling, carrying out tasks—a man planing wood and a couple leaning close in deep discussion, and the susurration of voices was as little threatened by exposure as the swish of shavings curling. People with nothing to hide from, no one to elude, careless of privacy, in their abundance: letting be. The food was delicious and roused a new pleasure, of greed. Rosa Burger had not known she could want to eat so much; but the Manx cat sniffed the fish-bones fragrant with herbs as an everyday offering. An Englishwoman came in the tight little hat, chiffon scarf and gloves of one who keeps up some bygone standard. She forestalled any possibility that she was unwelcome by the air of having her mind on more important matters than her friend’s guest, and being too busy to be expected to stay.—I’ve an appointment at the bank.—

  —You know the bank doesn’t open till three. Come on, Alice—

  —Not just the bank. There are plenty of things I have to see to.—

  —Such as, for instance ?—

  —Don’t pry into my affairs, Katya.—

  Madame Bagnelli laughed, pouring coffee.—Ah, if you had any, Alice, I’d be dying of curiosity. Here, just as you like it, strong, in a thin cup. We saw Darby on the way to her liquid lunch.—

  —In the bar tabac ?—

  —No, on the hill.—

  —Oh yes. She must have been down to the aide sociale office about her rent.—

  —Not on a Tuesday. Thursday’s for interviews.—

  —What’s today ? Are you sure ? Well perhaps she went to the clinic. She never tells when there’s something wrong. Likes to think she’s not flesh and blood like the rest of us. But I notice how she’s short of breath on the stairs. I can hear her when she goes past my door up to the second flight.—

  —And who else did I see, before I went to the airport—Françoise, yes, Françoise without Marthe, trying to makeup her mind whether to buy sardines at five francs a kilo. She didn’t see me.—

  —Oh Marthe’s
in Marseilles. Didn’t you know ? For three days. She came round to ask if she could do anything for us, there. Darby said some of those green peppercorns we had last time.—

  —Well she probably phoned. I’ve been in and out—Rosa coming. But you can get them here, why bother ?—

  —Not the Madagascar kind.—

  —Yes, the Madagascar ones. In the shop behind the post office. Yes, yes, right there, Monsieur Harbulot has them. Exactly the same, I assure you.—

  —Well I’m not so sure. Have you seen Georges ?—

  —They’ve gone to Vintimille to buy shoes. And some place where they get their olive oil. Manolis doesn’t like any other.—

  —He’s lucky if Georges can afford to indulge his whims, that’s all I can say.—

  —Donna and Didier went along.—

  —What for?—

  Madame Bagnelli appealed to her house-guest against the absurdity of the question.—For the ride. For fun.—

  —Spoiling that boy, too. Just as she did the others. You’ll see.—

  A French voice flew through the house like a trapped cuckoo. Another woman arrived and the same sort of conversation continued in French. The first woman stopped in the doorway to talk another five minutes.—Well, I hope you enjoy your holiday or whatever it is. Did Darby meet her, this morning?—

  —Of course, for a moment. Why ?—

  With the Englishwoman hardly out of earshot Madame Bagnelli was explaining:—Wanted to be the one to tell Darby she’d met the girl at Katya’s—did you see that!—It was repeated in French and she and the Frenchwoman rose to a heightened pitch of laughter, each cutting across the comments of the other. There was an anxious attempt at English now and then.—But you have the beautiful sunshine too, êh...it’s a wonderful country? I know. I like to go there, but—The Frenchwoman pulled the enchanting face of a woman twenty years younger and rubbed first-finger and thumb together. The two women then fell into a discussion about money, serious and with twitches of pain in the expression about their mouths, calculations reeled off in which Rosa distinguished only milles and cents colliding along chains of hyphens as the bees did sottishly round the dregs of wine. A young man had appeared; she turned her chair away from the sun, and found the battlements of the castle up there behind her in the sky, the flags luminous as stained glass, and down in the indoor shadowy hush of the house was aware that one of the objects detached itself and moved into human shape. She saw him eavesdropping before he made himself known. Out in the light of the terrace, he had come upon them all on bare feet, tightly bound in blinding white pants to just below the navel and naked above it. Two sea-pumiced brown hands over Madame Bagnelli’s eyes and she seemed to know the touch instantly. —But you’re in Vintimille—What happened?—