Burger's Daughter Page 26

  Their Katya’s complaining about Poliakoff becomes a performance she improvises along our laughter.—Look at the handwriting. Need a bloody code expert to unhook his G’s from E‘s—a wire cutter never mind a magnifying glass—can you believe it ? B’s like those old-fashioned carpet-beaters-and on top of everything he writes in bed at night after he’s put his face-pack on—d’you see! page all smeared with cucumber milk or yoghurt and egg-yolk or whatever it is he concocts—sometimes I just make up a sentence myself to fill in, Delphine sniffs cocaine from Marcel’s manly armpit, he doesn’t notice the difference...more likely sees I’ve improved the thing and too jealous to admit—

  —What’s a groupie, anyway—

  —You know. One of those girls who follow singers and actors around. Tear the shirts off their backs. Or they just worship with fixed eyes—Ivan’s do.—

  I giggle with their Katya like the adolescent girls at school, who were in that phase while Sipho Mokoena was showing Tony and me the bullet hole in his trouser-leg and I was running back and forth to visit prison, the first prison, where my mother was. The oriental-looking head of Christ that is half-painted, half-stamped on leather is a present from Ivan Poliakoff—the first ikon I have ever seen. You took me to an exhibition of famous ones on loan from the Hermitage in Leningrad; Gregorian chants were being relayed as we spent a whole morning looking at the face of the pale and swarthy outcast. You said, He’s so beautiful I could believe in him. In some examples his crown of thorns was spiked with red jewels, to represent blood, I suppose. A beige-and-white couple whose silk clothes suggested they were worn once and thrown away, examined the rubies and garnets close-up, silent, she with a pair of half-lens gilt glasses, passing the catalogue between their hands soft and clean as new kid gloves, clustered with gold. Coming around behind us was a young American with an arm along his wife’s nape, a baby in a seat on his back and a five- or six-year-old by the hand. He showed the little boy the Christian mask that represents the world’s suffering the way Japanese masks represent various states of being, in the theatre.—See Kimmie, that’s our Lord, he probably looked a whole lot more like that than the man with blue eyes and blond hair they show you in Grade School.—

  Then we went to swim at one of the coves between Antibes and Juan les Pins Katya’s friends regard as their own preserve, keeping among yourselves the difficult and unexpected way to get down, trespassing and scrambling past restaurant dustbins. I could lead anyone, by now. We pooled our picnic lunch with Donna and Didier. It was the last time this summer they would come there, she said, the Swedes and Germans arrive after the middle of June; one will have to swim off-shore from the yacht. She’s very orderly-minded; impulse does not rule this woman who can do whatever she likes. I gather from conversations she sails to the Bahamas in November, goes skiing in January, and likes to travel somewhere she hasn’t been before—in the East, or Africa, say, for a month late in the European summer. She’s surprised I don’t know the African countries where she has gone game-watching and sight-seeing. She talks about them and I listen along with the other Europeans like Gaby Grosbois, for whom Africa is a holiday they can’t afford. It’s not possible to say how old this Donna is—again something she has determined with all her resources, the great-granddaughter of a Canadian railway millionaire, you tell me: this woman with long, pale red crinkly hair tied back from a handsome, naked face, a shine of bright down around the mouth and lower cheeks in the sun, has the same kind of frontier background I have. The Burgers were trekking to the Transvaal when the great-grandfather was laying rails across Indian territory. It’s an accident of birth, that’s all, whether one has a grandfather who has chosen a country where his descendants can become rich and not question the right, or whether it turns out to be one where the patrimony consists of discovering for oneself by what way of life the right to belong there must be earned by each succeeding generation, if it can be earned at all. I suppose her hair has faded. There may even be white strands blended into its thickness, one wouldn’t notice. She is probably forty-five or more, once a big pink-faced girl who still has mannish dimples poked reddening into the parentheses enclosing her smile. Sometimes when she is following what someone is saying to her she bares her teeth without smiling, a mannerism like a pleased snarl. I notice this habit because it’s the only sign of the strong sexuality I would expect to find in a woman who feels the need to buy a young lover. You and Gaby—Madame Bagnelli and Madame Grosbois—agree that this one is the best she’s had, not ‘a little bitch’ (you use the derogatory inversions of Lesbian friends) like Vaki the Greek, his predecessor.

  What happened to Vaki-the-Greek ?

  I pipe up from time to time, like a child listening to folk-lore. I am beginning to understand that there is a certain range of possibilities that can occur within the orbit of a particular order of life; they recur in gossip, in close conversations at the tables big enough only for elbows in the back of Jean-Paul’s bar, in noisy discussions on the terrace of this one’s house or that. Vaki-the-Greek went off to South America with the director of a German electronics company he picked up here in the village, on the place, Darby witnessed the whole thing and told Donna after the little bitch had disappeared with the Alfa Romeo that had been registered in his name, for her tax reasons. Didier is straight (I don’t know whether by this is meant not bisexual) and although he rightly expects to be treated generously, he’s not likely to be a thief—never!—When he goes, he’ll just go.—Gaby approves, endorsing Katya.

  Didier knows his job. How to please them; all of you. How to please Donna, although that may require some skill, at times he opts out of the company, sets up in the ivory tower of his youth to remind her of his confinement, at other times he is a shrewd and haughty personal aide confronting the garage over the price charged for repairs, going with her to argue with her lawyers—whatever the relationship is between them, I notice it is never so smoothly bonded as when we meet them either before or after one of their sessions with the lawyers, sharing the same preoccupation as other lovers would fondle under a table. And there are the occasions, perfectly timed, when I see him turn and go back to the room he is leaving as with some premonition of the significance of the moment, to kiss her once, on the mouth, holding her gravely by the upper arms. She is never the one to make the move to fondle him in public. That must be one of the unspoken arrangements between them, to save her face before other women ? By some sound instinct he knows when to make the move towards her that she cannot allow herself to make towards him.

  His professionalism extends to me. He and Donna exchange the left-and-right cheek-greeting with me as everyone else has been doing since my first few days in your house but he doesn’t flirt with me as he does with women older than Donna. Heterosexual or Lesbian, you all belong to a category that cannot challenge her. That’s the code. There was that particularly hot day when Donna’s yacht was being painted and he decided to come with us to swim from one of the beaches too polluted for her. Katya, Madame Grosbois, Solvig—he lies among them safe from demands as they are. If I try to describe him to myself in a word it’s to call him precocious—a boy at home with preoccupations on the other side of test and struggle. To be made rich is ageing, if you are young. On the beach, even the sexuality of his body, the curve of his genitals making a shield of the white trunks, was not aggressive. The Norwegian lady took off her bikini bra, Madame Grosbois displayed a belly puckered and loosened by child-bearing long ago. His body’s presence didn’t shame any of you. I begin to see here that modesty’s really a function of vanity. When the body is no longer an attraction, an expression of desire, to bare your breasts and belly is simple; you lay like old dogs or cats grateful for the sun. No offence was meant.

  We swam the waveless peacock-shaded sea, Rosa, Didier, Katya —you talking and calling and flinging away from yourself bits of floating plastic board as if you believe, like an early navigator, somewhere there is an edge of the world over which they’ll be carried and break the global c
ycle by which what you rid yourself of returns. You tired and floated; Didier and I swam on round a small headland into a stripe of deep blue and came ashore among rocks, where I cut my toe on a sardine-tin. Threadworms of blood came from me in the water; when I took my foot out, from under an eyelid of skin red pain runnelled. I hopped over the pebbles. It hadn’t hurt after the first stab, in the water, but now it was seared by the air. We examined my toe together; blood; the reminder of vulnerability, life always under the threat of being spilled. A little ceremony of blood-brotherhood, every time.

  —We need something to tie.—He was very severe.

  Well, two people in a bikini and trunks; we didn’t have it. I smiled—it would be all right, the water would wash out the cut well on the swim back.

  I must hold the foot high to reverse the flow. I said no, no, it was all right, the chill of the water would staunch it.

  —But it hurts you, no?—Water was shaken on him where he crouched with my foot between his knees. The sprinkle on his face already dried stiff in the sun came from my hair, he called—Hey!—flashed me a squinting annoyed look against the light. My toe disappeared from the exposure to pain; I felt it surrounded by gentle warmth and softness. Because his head was ducked I felt before I saw that he had my toe in his mouth. Ridiculous—ridiculous at the same time as sensual, as so many sensual moves are, if you set yourself outside them. But it was done with such confidence I understood it as I was meant to.

  As he squatted there before me I saw and felt his head, his tongue as if it were between my legs—he knew it.

  —My dirty foot! I walked all round the valley early this morning.—

  —How can it be dirty, your foot—out of the sea, Rôse, tell me—He held it between his palms like a rabbit or a bird, and he knew he was holding it to suggest this.

  —Come on Didier. We must swim back.—

  He mimicked.—Come on Didier, we must go—Rôse, it’s true your feet are a bit broad, peasant feet, but you have a beautiful navel, it’s really like the one on the top of an orange—now why do you pull your face, why shouldn’t we laugh together—Rôse—

  —Didier, not with me.—

  —With you ?—

  —You don’t have to.—

  —What do you mean, don’t have to. I don’t have to do anything. I do what I feel.—

  —I put it badly.—

  —Rôse, you are talking—what are you talking.—

  —You know. If a new woman turns up—a girl, among the friends, you...it’s like being nice to the older women; appropriate—

  —But we’re young, Rôse—He seems sometimes to take up lines of dialogue he has heard in television serials.—Mnh ? It’s natural, êh. We are the only young ones!—what’s the matter with you ?—

  I said to this strange being, as if I knew him:—You think it’s wrong then, with Donna, unnatural—making love, living with her ?—

  He frowned sceptically.

  —Because she’s so much older? A sacrifice? She owes you something ?—

  —What ? Donna is a generous woman.—

  —Me. Owes me to you.—

  He made a mouth like the mouths of cherubs blowing the four winds in the Italian pictures in Solvig’s collection. They tell me this part of France was Italian a hundred years ago; I see faces I thought belonged to the eighteenth or nineteenth century.—She doesn’t expect I should not like girls. She must understand, êh. She likes a young man.—

  If I am curious about them, these people, to me it seems they allow me to be so because I am a foreigner. But I see it’s that they are not afraid of being found out, the nature of their motives is shared and discussed; because the premise is accepted by everybody : live where it’s warm, buy, sell or take pleasure honestly—that is, according to your circumstances. They recognize their only imperatives as dependence on a tight-knotted net of friendship, and dedication to avoiding tax wherever possible while using all the state welfare one can contrive to qualify for—the rebates, allocations, grants and pensions they are always discussing, whether rich or poor.—So it’s all right, then ?—

  He was still playing with my foot, but one of the grey beach pebbles would have been the same, to his hand.—It’s fine. We go along very well together. She’s a good business woman, you know. She looks after her money.—(Doesn’t he know about Vaki the Greek ? Of course he does; what went wrong there is regarded by him as a calculated risk in relations of the category of hers with Vaki and himself: I’m learning.)—She knows how to enjoy it. I’ve been around the world. We go wherever we like.—

  —And it’s your whole life ?—

  —Oh, I’ll do other things. I’ve got ideas.—

  His sulks are a ploy, then, something to bring Donna to an edge of apprehension about holding him. He feels free, this kept boy: free to be one.

  —Things you’d be doing if you weren’t with her.—

  —Not necessarily. I have a good friend in America—we want to set up in Paris what they have at the Metropolitan Museum there (I shook my head, I have never been to the Metropolitan Museum) —get a franchise for making reproductions of works of art to sell in the French museums. Egyptian cats and imitations of jewellery and so on. It’s a good thing. Nobody in France thought of it before. You just have to be the first—the same with everything. Donna and I are looking into the possibility of bringing truffles by air from the desert somewhere near where you...I forget. We are meeting a man about it in Milan.—

  —But you don’t work, here. You do feel it’s your life, this ?—

  —Why not ? You’ll find somebody. You can’t go back, êh ?—

  —Katya must have said that.—

  —Donna mentioned... I suppose they talk. Botswana—that’s the name. The man in Milan says the natives in the desert sometimes have nothing to eat but truffles...the poor things, êh... 600 francs a kilo...!—He began to link his fingers through my toes again, prepared to give himself a second chance at rousing me.—I know a lot—well, not a lot—about where you come from. I’m from Maurice, you know that ?—Mauritius, you call it. Nearly Africa ! Oh god...—He was laughing.—It’s nothing for me. Filthy. Poor. Sometimes I like to make Donna sick when I tell her how the dogs, some dogs in Port Louis have ruptures here—he drew a breath to suck in his narrow belly—they hang down right onto the street.—

  He laughed again, at my face, but he didn’t see the donkey that still exists somewhere.

  —Donna goes crazy.—

  —I don’t know why Katya should have said that.—

  —Africa is no good for white people any more. Same on the islands. It was okay when I was a kid.—

  —I was born there. It’s my home.—

  —What does that matter. Where you can live the way you like, that’s what counts. We have to forget about it.—

  —My father died in prison there.—

  —You know why we went to Maurice? My father was a collaborator with the Germans and he was sent to prison after the war. People only talk about their families who were in the Resistance. Oh yes. Nobody thought maybe the Germans were going to win—oh no. Donna makes me swear not to tell anybody! She’s from Canada, what does she know about it, can you tell me! I know people whose mothers had their hair shaved off for sleeping with Germans. We have to forget about them. It’s not our affair. I’m not my father, êh ?—

  He helped me back into the water, supported by my arm round his neck. There was nothing sexual about the closeness; it was the huddle of the confidences common among all of you, the friends in the village—the divorced women and women widowed, like Madame Bagnelli, by lovers, the old Lesbians and young homosexuals. When we got back to you on the beach he must have remembered my stupidity, not having taken the easy opportunity of making love, and he was cool to me and sharp with Donna for the next few days when she and he were in my presence. Sometimes he trails a caress as I pass him; but it’s only to see if I will pounce. It’s playful and even derogatory.

  A morning can be filled by sh
opping in the market. Not in the sense of passing time; filled with the peppery-snuff scent of celery, weak sweet perfume of flowers and strawberries, cool salty secretions of sea-slippery fish, odour of cheeses, contracting the nasal membranes; the colours, shapes, shine, density, pattern, texture and feel of fruits and vegetables; the encounters and voices of people handling them. By the time Madame Bagnelli and her guest had moved along the stalls—meeting acquaintances, admiring dogs or children entangled with their legs—comparing prices between this vendor and that, had bought a pot-plant not on Madame Bagnelli’s list and eaten a piece of spinach tart, they needed an espresso at the bar on the corner where the young workmen were coming in and out off their vélos and the old men in casquettes deciding bets for the tiercé were already drinking small glasses of red wine. By the time the women got back up the hill to her house, Madame Bagnelli had tooted at someone who asked them in for an aperitif, or Gaby Grosbois and her husband Pierre dropped by to take theirs on Madame Bagnelli’s terrace—Pierre and the little Rôse drinking pastis, and the two older women following Gaby’s régime, telling them how good vegetable juice was for ridding the body of toxins.

  Madame Bagnelli carried whatever she had to do out onto that terrace. Squatting on a stool in her frayed espadrilles she picked over herbs she had gathered with her guest on the Col de Vence and was going to dry. She sand-papered an old table she had bought cheaply when they went to the street market near the old port in Antibes, and hoped to sell to some Germans who had taken a house next door to Poliakoff; her chin settled into the flesh of her neck and flecks of gilt caught on the clotted mascara of her eyelashes. In the same position, uncomfortable-looking for a woman her size, with her sewing machine on a low table between her legs, she made the flowing garments Gaby Grosbois cut out—I tell her, Rôse, she is still a woman, êh, men still look...she must know what to wear. This year nobody is wearing like this—tight, short—for her the style is good, very loose, décolleté—no, no, Katya, you have still a beauty, I’m telling you—The two women laugh, embracing.—If with Pierre everything was still working—(more laughter, her mouth playing at tragedy)—I will be worried—