Burger's Daughter (30 page)

I went without saying goodbye to Marisa.

Someone threw a stone, yes. Perhaps one of the little ones with baby brothers or sisters humped on their backs, shouting voetsak! at the dogs, flung a stone not meant for me. If someone did report I'd been at a public meeting with a possible political intention, there were no consequences. Nothing and nobody stopped me from using that passport. After the donkey I couldn't stop myself. I don't know how to live in Lionel's country.

 

 

Conrad. I did not tell you before. The yacht was never found. I may have been talking to a dead man: only to myself.

—Wang Yang-ming—

T
he silk tent of morning sea tilted, pegged to keyhole harbours where boats nosed domestically like animals at a trough; Vauban's ancient fort squatted out to the water; two S-shaped buildings towered, were foreshortened, leaned this side and that of the wing, rose again. Lavender mountains with a snail-trail spittle of last winter's snow swung a diagonal horizon across the fish-bowl windows. Down to earth, the plane laid itself on the runway as the seagulls (through convex glass under flak of droplets) breasted the sea beside it.

Passengers who disperse from the last step of a plane's stairway all hurry but their oncoming seems slowed, their legs don't carry them, they're seen through the horizontal waverings-away of a telescopic lens. The long last moment before anybody is recognizable : a woman tipped into her mouth the drop of melted sugar settled in the bottom of an espresso thimble and stood at the glass wall. Her eyes held the moving figures, her expression becoming an offering like a bunch of flowers held ready, but her head hawked forward in tense curiosity.

She left the bar and hurried to the little crowd gathered at the barrier before the passport officers' booths. Among the elegant homosexuals with bodies of twenty-year-olds and faces like statues of which only the head remains of the ancient original, the blonde with nipples staring through her shirt, the young man with a Siamese cat on a leash, the well-preserved women wearing gold chains and sharkskin pants attended by husbands and poodles, the demanding American children with wet gilt hair, the black-clad grandmothers borne up emotionally by daughters and the frilly infants held by young fathers in leather jackets, she was the one: rounded knuckles of cheekbone, brilliant blue dabs under clotted lashes, wrinkled made-up lids, tabby hair. The one with the neck rising elegantly although the bosom was big and she was low in the welcoming crowd—stocky, and when they could be seen the legs had the ex-dancer's hard lumpy calves and fleshless ankles.

Her gaze, pushing through the queue bunched behind the immigration booths, setting aside this one from that, passed over once and then returned, singled out. She was watching the approach of a girl sallow and composed with fatigue. The girl had curly hair—dark girl—and a look around the jaw, a set of the mouth (that was it: the woman's expression deepened strongly) although the eyes were clear and light, not what she was looking for.

They had seen each other. The understanding spun a thread along which they were being drawn together while the girl took her turn; almost at the immigration booth, now; now there, putting the green passport on the counter for an official hand to draw under the glass partition; bending suddenly to dig in the bulging sling-bag (a hitch ? a document missing ?—the woman craned on her toes.) The eyes-down face of someone under surveillance. A faint, sideways smile to the woman watching. (Nothing wrong; just the usual traveller's start of anxiety that something has been remembered too late.) The girl was pushing the green passport into a pocket on the outside of the bag. She drew the zip firmly closed. She moved on, she was in: received. Coming across the few yards, through the barrier, the whole of her could be seen clear of other people, small girl with a sexy, ignored body (the mother had always somehow ignored her own beauty, found it of no account) dressed in the inevitable jeans outfit yet never in a thousand years would have passed for one of the young from yachts and hotels and villas wearing the same thing. Pretty. But not young-looking. A face seen on a child who looks like a woman.

The corners of the mouth dented but the lips remained tightly closed, the strangely light eyes were fixed on the woman with an expression of self-amazement, as if the girl doubted her own existence at that moment, in that place.

They had never seen one another before. The woman's worn lilac-coloured espadrilles splayed sturdily in welcome. She held her arms in a wide tackle and her mouth was parted, smiling, smiling.

 

 

The aircraft Rosa Burger boarded was bound for France. The destination on her ticket was Paris but after two nights in a small hotel where she did not unpack she flew back in the direction she had come from, south, to Nice. There she was met on a beautiful May morning by a Madame Bagnelli, who when she was very young had gone to the Sixth Congress in Moscow, had been or tried to be a dancer, was once married to Lionel Burger. She had a son by him living in Tanzania whom she had not seen since he was a student; she took his daughter home to her house in a medieval village, preserved to make money out of tourists, where—the people who had known her in South Africa heard—she had been living for years.

She talked all the way above the noise of the old Citroen into which she settled herself like a sitting hen. There was an impression of speed beyond the car's capacity, because of her style of driving and the jig of windows that opened like flaps. She had had a terrible feeling it was the wrong day—she should have been at the airport yesterday—she had rummaged everywhere to check with the letter —put away too carefully—that was why she was so excited, relieved when she saw—

—You'd given me the phone number.—

—Oh I was afraid if you arrived and I wasn't there—you'd just have gone off again—I was so worried—

Changing from lane to lane of traffic along a sea-front, bursts of conversation in another tongue, scenes from unimaginable lives in the space of a car window and the pause at a red light, palm-trees, whiffs of nougat against carbon monoxide, pink oleanders, fish shining in a shop open to the street, pennants fluttering round a car mart, old men in pomponned caps bending over balls, shop-signs silently mouthed—Oh that—fort, château, same thing, all their castles were fortifications. That's Antibes. We'll go one day—the Picasso museum's inside. Good god, what's he think he's doing,
quel con
, my god,
ça va pas la tête, êh
? These kids on scooters, they attack like wasps. It's twelve o'clock, that's why this town is hell, everyone rushing home for lunch...don't worry, we'll make it, I just must stop for bread—are you hungry ? I hope you've got a good appetite, mmh ?—Would you rather have lettuce or cress ? You must say. Start off the way we're going to go on, you know—I'm not going to treat you like a visitor.—

She came out of the baker's and pushed a baton of bread through the window. At the greengrocer next door she turned to smile at her passenger. In the wisp of tissue-paper that belted it, the bread crackled under the pressure of Rosa Burger's hand; she sniffed the loaf like a flower; the woman's smile broadened and mimed—go on, take a bite. Children in pinafores were being dragged past by brusque young women or old ones in slippers who blocked the pavement while they gossiped. On balconies, men ate lunch in their vests. The tables outside a bar were tiny islands round which people greeted each other with a kiss on either cheek. Rosa Burger sat in the car like an effigy borne in procession. Out of the town, past plant nurseries and cement works, the light on the new leaves of vines hunched like cripples, grey-headed olives surviving among villas, the sea appearing and disappearing from bend to bend:—They told me over the phone, a direct plane
tonight
so of course I thought my god I‘ve—then I told myself, stop fussing... I'm so glad you've come before the pear and apple's quite over—look—up there, d'you know whose house that is ? Renoir lived there—

A frail foam pricked through by green on trees hollowed like wine glasses; where ? where ? The girl gazed at a day without landmarks. No sooner was something pointed out than it was behind; to the driver all was so familiar she saw what was no longer visible. The car began to buck up a steep gravelly way between the park secrecy of European riverine forest, roadside tapestry flowers ashy with dust. Like the sea, a castle turned this way and that.—Poor things, more tin cans than fish in our river these days, but they keep trying. You actually do see some with a tiddler or two...—A child's pop-up picture book castle at the pinnacle of grey and yellow-rose houses and walls, rising from the apartment blocks that filled the valley like vast white ocean liners berthed from the distant sea. Awnings bellied; leaning people were dreamily letting the car pass across their eyes an image like that in the convex mirror set up at the blind intersection. Shutters were closed; unknown people hidden undiscoverable behind there. A woman on a vélo with a child dangling legs through the parcel-carrier was drawn level with, greeted, wobbling and puttering, overtaken.—She does for me, you'll meet her on Tuesday, what hell with that child when it was little, peed on my bed and when it started to crawl! It was into everything, biscuits crumbled on my papers and books—how do you feel? About children ? I am a grandmother I suppose, but for me it's so long since I handled... How old are you, Rosa ? I was thinking last night, how old can she be, that girl—twenty-three ? No ? Nearer twenty-five ? Seven—my god.—

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.