Burger's Daughter Page 25

  He bent round to her face and kissed her, then ceremoniously, leisurely, went over to bend to the face of the Frenchwoman. When he had kissed her she took his face in her palms and said something whose cadence was adoring and admiring, motherly-lustful.

  —What are you doing here? Didier!—

  He leaned against the balustrade before his audience.—I didn’t go.—In a dark-tanned face the nostrils had the pink rawness of one who has been diving.

  —And Donna ?—

  —She went.—

  —Didier ? But why ?—

  The Frenchwoman said of the lost opportunity, things were so much cheaper over the border in Vintimille; he had seen the leather coat Manolis got there last winter ?

  —Didier ? What’ve you been doing all day alone, then ?—

  —Fishing. Spear-fishing. You don’t need anyone to do it with.—They were introduced but he didn’t address himself to Rosa Burger. The questions and comments of the women fawned round him inquisitively and appreciatively; he seemed not to address anyone, eyeing himself in an accompanying vision of himself, like a mirror. He went purposefully about the table under the awning finding morsels he ate quickly, licking his fingers. He waved down offers to fetch something more for him to eat; wiped round the salad bowl, soaking bread in the oil, served himself cheese wrapped in straw, with a certain professional deftness. His dark cloudy blue eyes under lashes so long he seemed to trail them on his cheeks, his chewing jaw, followed the return of the women’s talk to the subject of taxes. Now and then he put in an objection or correction; they argued. He belched, hit flat belly-muscles, ran fine hands over smooth pectorals. They laughed;—Like that cat, Didier. Come for titbits and just stalk off.—He was embracing the women again, swinging gracefully from one to the other. He said goodbye to the girl in English used in the casual manner of an habitual tongue but with a marked French and slight American accent.

  —When are they coming back ?—

  The voice was caught before the slam of the door.—How should I know ?—

  —Naughty boy! What are you sulking about ?—Madame Bagnelli yelled, bold and laughing, out of range. She performed a little caper of activity and swooped on the table, scooping up dishes, emptying bees and dregs among the flower-urns. The Frenchwoman left. They tidied away the remains of the meal, lingering in the cool livingroom to talk, Madame Bagnelli’s voice flitting without cease from where she bent into the refrigerator in the kitchen, or sank suddenly, legs crossed at the ankle balletically, to a little sofa. Her guest had opened the suitcase and brought out the offerings that are part of the ritual of arrival. The girl eyed them warily now that they had found their recipient—safe options chosen for someone not known, they might seem only to do for anybody, the interchangeable airport gifts she herself had had her share of, all the years she had stayed at home. Only one suggested a particular being imagined, asserted associations that might not exist, or might be unwelcome: a double necklace of finely-carved hexagonal wooden spools separated by cheap store beads.

  The woman looked at it looped in her hands; quickly at Rosa Burger; at the necklace, and parted a bead from a spool.—See what they’re strung on. What’s it called...that palm...Ilala. Ilala palm thread spun by rolling the fibres up and down on your bare thigh. I’ve seen them do it. Look, not cotton! Ilala palm—She broke into pleased pride at the verification, identification in herself. —And the wood—don’t say, wait—His daughter stood there before her.—Tambuti. Yes ? That scent! It’s Tambuti.—

  —I think so. They’re the things the Herero women wear. There’s a shop...very occasionally you find something—

  —It’s from Namibia—even the Afrikaners don’t call it South West anymore, eh ?—She wandered round her livingroom considering the disposition of a strange blood-dark head of Christ on leather embossed in flaky gold, staring almond eyes; a picture of a nude girl with an eel or other sea-monster mutilated beside her; a great iron key; jagged with age and an ancient fervour that had hacked it from the whole, a fragment of a rigid wooden saint raising a pleated hand and upright finger over the fireplace. She hung the necklace from a candle-bracket marbled thick with the lava of wax. —When I’m not wearing it, I want to enjoy seeing it.—

  —The day before yesterday’s. I thought you might like to— Rosa Burger hesitated before dumping along with crumpled wrappings the South African newspaper that had been standing up from her bag when the woman first singled her out.

  —Good god. How many years...—Madame Bagnelli sank down holding the paper at arm’s length.—Same old mast-head... In the kitchen, you’ll see a pair of specs. Probably on the shelf where the coffee-grinder...on the fridge or in the fridge—sometimes I take something out and put them down without...—She dismissed herself with a twirl of fingers.—You were still there. Only the day before yesterday.—She was looking at Rosa Burger as at someone whose existence she, too, could not believe in. His daughter wagged her head slowly; they were together.—Have you ever been out before ?—

  The head weaved, making its way, setting aside in the soft confusion of wine all that had been emerged from.

  —Never.—

  —Of course never.—

  —And you have never been back.—

  The woman drew her elbows against her body, rocked herself cherishingly, fists together under her chin, the newspaper fell. —Ah, they wouldn’t get me. Never.—

  She sprang up on her wide-planted feet; balance and agility contradicted bulk.—Can we do the monkey-trick ? Up my staircase, swing by tails—

  There was scarcely room for her to pass between wall and wall with a thick silky cord, a theatre prop, swagged up one in place of a rail. As she led she was explaining how to manage some eccentricity of the hot-water tap in the bathroom; she panted cheerfully.

  At the top was a room clear with different qualities of light. It brimmed against the ceiling; underneath, patterns and forms showed shallowly ribbed. A big jar of lilac, scent of peaches furry in a bowl, dim mirrors, feminine bric-a-brac of bottles and brushes, a little screen of ruched taffeta for sociable intimacies, a long cane chair to read the poetry and elegant magazines in, a large low bed to bring a lover to. It was a room made ready for someone imagined. A girl, a creature whose sense of existence would be in her nose buried in flowers, peach juice running down her chin, face tended at mirrors, mind dreamily diverted, body seeking pleasure. Rosa Burger entered, going forward into possession by that image. Madame Bagnelli, smiling, coaxing, saw that her guest was a little drunk, like herself.

  If I’d been black that would at least have given the information I was from Africa. Even at a three-hundred-year remove, a black American. But nobody could see me, there, for what I am back where I come from. Nobody in Paris—except, of course, there’s the cousin. The daughter of Auntie Velma and Uncle Coen, with whom I share our grandmother’s name. She was in Paris, with me, selling South African oranges somewhere in these buildings flaring to a prow from diminishing perspectives where two streets merge V-shaped, in my single evening, walking them. I could have looked up the Citrus Board under its French title in the directory. The boerevrou with her tour group’s pin beside me in the plane remarked as we chatted in our language, it’s a great pity we Afrikaners don’t travel enough. Stick-at-homes, she said. True, for one reason or another. She at forty-three (she confessed) and I at twenty-seven (she asked) going to Europe for the first time.

  I knew from books and talk of people like Flora and William I was in the quarter tourists went to because the nineteenth-century painters and writers whose lives and work have been popularized romantically once lived there. Thousands of students seem to occupy their holes of hotels and haunts now, blondes and gypsies in displayed poverty the poor starve to conceal, going in fishermen’s boots or barefoot through the crowds, while back on Uncle Coen’s farm people save shoes for Sundays. Girls and men whose time is mine, talking out their lives the way clocks tick, buying tiny cups of coffee for the price of a bag of mealie-meal, drinking w
ine in the clothes of guerrillas surviving in the bush on a cup of water a day. Dim stairs, tiny bent balconies, endless dovecotes of dormer windows were nearly all dark; everyone in the streets. I walked where they walked, I turned where they turned, taking up the purpose of these or those for a few yards or a block. They met and kissed, kissed and parted, ate thin pancakes made in a booth glaring as a forge, bought papers, paraded for a pick-up. If students play charades, there were surely others wearing the garb playing at being students, and still others wanting to be taken for their idea of models, actors, painters, writers, film directors. Which were the clerks and waiters off duty ? How could I tell. Only the male prostitutes, painted and haughty enough to thrill and intimidate prospective clients, are plainly what they are: men preserving the sexual insignia of the female, creature extinct in the preferences of their kind. One went up and down before the café where I sat with the drink I bought myself. He wore a long jade-green suede coat open on a bare midriff with a silver belt round it and his face of inhumanly stylized beauty was a myth. If I had been a man I would have approached just to see if words would come from it as from any ordinary being.

  The Boulevard Saint-Michel was my thread back to the hotel with its cosmetic gilt-and-glass foyer and old-clothes cupboard of a room with the bidet smelling of urine. I kept wandering down side streets to the sight of eddies of people in the soft coloured light from little restaurants and stalls of bright sticky sweetmeats and lurid skewers of meat. Under the sagging, bulging buildings of this Paris along streets that streamed into one another was a kind of Eastern bazaar; more my idea of a souk, where also I have never been. Bouzouki music wound above the heads of people in sociable queues outside small cinemas burrowed into existing buildings. The cobbled streets with beautiful names were closed to traffic; from the steep end of one called Rue de la Harpe, a crowd pressed back to form an open well down which I looked on a man from whose mouth flames leapt and scrolled in a fiery proliferation of tongues. I was moved into the crowd, kneaded slowly along by the shifting of shoulders. There were still heads in front of me but I could see the man with his anxious, circus-performer’s eyes sizing up the audience while he turned himself into a dragon with a swill of petrol and a lighted faggot. He pranced up and down my patch of vision between collars, necks and the swing of hair. I was enclosed in this amiable press of strangers, not a mob because they were not brought together by hostility or enthusiasm, but by mild curiosity and a willingness to be entertained. I couldn’t easily move on until their interest loosened, but closeness was not claustrophobic. Our heads were in the open air of a melon-green night; buoyed by these people murmuring and giggling in their quick, derisive, flirtatious language, I could look up at the roof-tops and chimney-pots and television aerials so black and sharp and one-dimensional they seemed to ring out the note of a metal bar struck and swallowed into the skies of Paris. Close to bodies I was comfortably not aware of individually and that were not individually aware of me, I instantly was alive to the slight swift intimacy of a movement directed only to me. As swiftly, my hand went down to that flutter of a caress; I seized, as it slid out between the flap of my sling-bag and my hip, a hand.

  I held very tightly.

  The fingers were pressed together extended helpless and the knuckle bones bent inwards across the palm to the curve of my grip, unable to make a fist. The arm above the hand could not jerk it free because the arm was pressed shoulder to shoulder with me, the body to which the arm belonged was jammed against mine.

  Still locked to that hand I couldn’t see, I turned to find the face it must belong to. Among this crowd of strangers in this city of Europe, among Frenchmen and Scandinavians and Germans and Japanese and Americans, blue eyes and curly blondness, Latin pallor, the lethargic Lebanese and dashing Greeks, the clear and delicate-skulled old Vietnamese who had passed me unseeingly, the Arabs with caps of dull springy hair, pale brown lips and almost Scottish rosiness on the cheekbones whom I had identified as I heard their oracular gabble on the streets I walked—among all these a black man had been edged, pushed, passed along to my side. The face was young and so black that the eyes, far-apart in taut openings, were all that was to be made out of him. Eyeballs of agate in which flood and volcanic cataclysms are traced; the minute burst blood-vessels were held in the whites like a fossil-pattern of fern. If he hadn’t been black he might have succeeded in looking like everybody else—sceptically or boredly absorbed in the spectacle of the fire-eater. But the face could not deny the hand in anonymous confusion with like faces. He was what he was. I was what I was, and we had found each other. At least that is how it seemed to me—this ordinary matter of pickpocket and victim, that’s all, nothing but a stupid tourist with a bag, deserving to be discovered.

  A twinge moved a muscle beside the straight, wide-winged nose. I pretended to be innocent of staring at the face of a stranger. He had round his thin neck with pimples like gravel under the silver-black skin there, a chain with an animal tooth bobbing with his heart-beat, one of the bits of home I’d seen blacks like him selling, all day, bean-necklaces and crude masks and snakeskin wallets, shaking West African rattles in the Tuileries to attract custom. I heard or felt something drop. I said to him—I don’t know what—and it was in English, of course, or maybe in Afrikaans (because that was what I had spoken on the plane and my tongue was still coupled with that speech centre). He wouldn’t have understood, anyway, even if he had not been deaf with fear, because I was not speaking in French or Fulani or whatever it was would have meaning for him. And if I had appealed to the people around us—they wouldn’t have understood either. I didn’t know the French, didn’t have the words to explain the hand in mine.

  I let go. I let him go. He couldn’t run.

  Somehow I managed to butt down and feel for my purse or wallet of traveller’s cheques or passport. I brought up from among feet a little black book; he had felt for leather, and come up with the address book in which, anyway, I have been trained to record nothing more valuable than the whereabouts of hotels and American Express offices. We were still close. His fear of me melted to a presence of connivance and contempt; because if I wouldn’t denounce him while I held him, no one need believe me now that I had set him free. It was a secret between us, among them; a ridiculous position we were in, until leisurely—he couldn’t hurry like a thief—he made himself appear to be pushed again, to drift on, moving thin shoulders swinging in a tenth-hand aspiration, someone’s once-plum-coloured jacket with the hunched cut I’d seen that day on sharp young Frenchmen dressed as they thought the rich and successful did.

  I went by way of Paris not to lead to you: my father’s first wife. Brandt Vermeulen didn’t think of her when he was making sure I’d understood whom I was expected to keep clear of. Yet no one who has ever been associated with my father will ever be off the list of suspects that is never torn up. If it could have occurred to anyone hers was the village, the house, she the one for whom I would make when they let me out—but who remembers her ?

  I feel an ass, among them: thinking how I came among these people who know such tactics only in their television policiers (the old Lesbians are addicts); for whom running down to the baker is a sociable act by which everyone else knows what time they’ve got up for breakfast, and whose contact with the police is an exchange of badinage about the inside story of the latest bank hold-up in Nice while they stand together with their midday pernods in Jean-Paul’s bar. Out of place: not I, myself—they assume my life is theirs, they’ve taken me in. But the manner of my coming—it doesn’t fit necessity or reality, here. Lionel Burger’s first wife. You are not to be found in Madame Bagnelli, their Katya. I could see that the particular form of baptism by which she got that name came back to her when I asked, the first day at the gate (before I’d seen my lovely room, this cool belfry of a house where their voices fly around) what I should call her. For them you’re Katya because in a small community of different and sometimes confused European origins mixed with the native French,
diminutives and adaptations of names are a cosy lingua franca.

  I suppose for them the name places you vaguely among the White Russians. Like old Ivan Poliakoff whose love stories you type at four francs a page. When I met him, with you in the village, he kissed my hand, lifting it in one so frail I felt the blood pushing slowly through the veins. I ask what the stories are about ? Such a very old man, one can’t imagine he can remember what it was like—love, sex. You tell me you have suggested he write romantic historical stuff about the affairs of counts and countesses, Russian aristocrats, using the setting of the great country estates where he spent his childhood.

  —At least the background would be something he knows. But no, his characters are groupies who get picked up by American film actors at the Cannes Festival or teenage heroin addicts who are saved by devoted pop-singers. He thinks he’s learnt the vocabulary from telly—hopeless, the manuscripts come straight back. And then he expects me to lower my rate to three francs!—

  People here don’t know I’m as removed from young life around the Cannes Film Festival as the ancient Russian count who won’t tell his age.—What’s a groupie ?—