Burger's Daughter (41 page)

They had taken on without thinking one of the ancient groupings of the couple; found a place in the grass where she folded her legs beneath her and he laid his head against her belly, feeling it shake when she laughed and hearing the muffled questioning sounds of her gut as a child of his in her would.—I'll come alone. We'd have a whole year.—

—I was talking with the dear boys before you came to Arnys' yesterday. They were consulting their horoscopes in
Marie-Claire
. Very serious. You know, I just found I had the words, I could put them together without thinking—The face turned up to hers was the face he must have had ten years earlier, a face to be curious about, smoothed like a piece of paper under the heel of a hand, unmarked by lines of ambitious anxiety, and as it was before the chin-crevice was deepened by sensual intelligence.—Oh your French will be fine. You'll manage perfectly all right. Maybe in Africa I'll even finish my bloody book. Ah, that's very good: one of the reasons for my taking the job after all will be that it's necessary to go back to colonial sources and so on.—

All practical matters were open between them; a wife and two children, a responsibility assumed long ago by a responsible man. The attitude on which Bernard and Rosa's acceptance of this circumstance rested was based on one of the simple statements of a complex man:—I live among my wife and children—not with them.—

The statement, in turn, seemed to seek an explanation from Rosa she could not give; but in the saying, the burden of it was shifted a little, her shoulder went under it beside his. They had no home but he was living very much with her. The security was almost palpable for him in the vigour and repose of her small body. Resting there, he gained what she had once and many times at the touch-line of her father's chest, warm and sounding with the beat of his heart, in chlorinated water. Her eyes (the colour of light, creating unease; Boer eyes,
pied-noir
eyes?)—moved above his head among trees, passers-by and—quick glance down—in a private motivation of inner vision as alert and dissimulating as the gaze her mother had been equally unaware of, looking up to see the daughter coming slowly over the gravel from the visit to her ‘fiancé' in prison.

The young smooth face spoke out beneath hers; from what he had been and what he was:—You are the dearest thing in the world to me.—

A
t gatherings they lost each other in the generality and then would become aware, near by, of the back of a head or a voice: she heard a slightly different version of Bernard Chabalier giving a slightly different version of what he had said about the painter.—fifty years, fauvism, futurism, cubism, abstract art—for him everything passes as nothing. 1945 is 1895. Maybe what is complete is timeless...but events change the consciousness of the world, it shakes and the shocks register seismographically in movements in art—

Donna was obliged to entertain an English friend who was the property of her family—the sort of single example, culled by them from the politico-intellectual circles whose existence they ignore, that is the pride of a rich family. He would take himself at their valuation of his distinction. He would expect to have a party given for him; Donna had had to round up, among the usual people she knew, a few that he would feel were on a level to appreciate him. Her explanation of what he was or rather did was unsure; had been a member of parliament, something to do with the fuss over Britain's entry into the Common Market, something to do with editing a journal. She couldn't remember how good his French was; the Grosbois, the Lesbians from the
brocanterie
and other people of her local French contingent collected in one part of her terrace, happy to make their own familiar party, anyway; Didier in an exquisite white Italian suit (only Manolis recognized pure raw silk) asserted his own kind of distinction while moving about swiftly serving drinks in the preoccupied detachment of someone hired for the occasion. His contribution to proper appreciation of the guest of honour was instinctively to take on a role in keeping with the position of Donna as the host of James Chelmsford. Chelmsford himself was got up in shirt-sleeves, blue linen trousers, espadrilles showing thick, pallid blue-veined ankles, yellow Liberty scarf under a shinily-shaven red face, drinking pastis; making it clear he was no newcomer to this part of the world. Donna shepherded round him a little group that included Rosa. It attracted one or two others who had opinions to solicit as an opening to giving their own—a journalist from Paris who was someone else's house-guest, a constructional engineer from the Société des Grands Travaux de Marseille.

—Why has it taken Solzhenitsyn to disillusion people with Marx ? Others've come out of the Soviet Union with the same kind of testimony. His Gulag isn't something we didn't all know about—

Chelmsford was listening to the journalist with an air of professional attention.—Well, for that matter of course, one might ask how since the Moscow trials—

—No, no—because they belong to the Stalinist period and the Left makes a strong distinction between what died with Stalin, that's the bad old days... But dating from the new era—post-Khrushchev—the thaw, the freeze again—everyone's been aware the same old horrors were going on, hospitals the latest kind of prison camp, new names for the old terror, that's all. Why should Solzhenitsyn rouse people ?—

—But has he ?—

The journalist gave the architect the smile for someone of no opinion. He addressed his reaction to the others.—Oh without question—after that creature so tortured, so damaged—who could meet his eyes on television, sitting there at home on a Roche-Bobois chair with a whisky in your hand. I know that I...that face that looks as if it has been hit—slapped, êh?—so that the cheeks have no feeling any more and the mouth that makes itself (he drew up his own shoulders, shook his clenched hands, and bunched his mouth until the lips whitened)—that mouth that makes itself so small from the habitude of not being allowed to speak freely. The Western Leftists don't know how to go on believing. They don't know what to defend in Marx, after him.—

—It's not easy to answer.—The engineer spoke up friendlily to Rosa as if for them both; he had the scrupulously tolerant manner of some new kind of missionary, his feet in sensible sandals, his blond head almost completely shaven for coolness in the river-mouth swamps of Brazil and Africa where (he chatted to her) he prepared surveys of prospective harbour sites.—Perhaps it's the approach, something in his style? The writing, I mean. Something Victor Hugoish that appeals to a wide public, much wider...—

—The public. The public in general were always ready to believe the Communists are nothing but beasts and monsters anyway—it's the intellectual Left that's rejecting Marx now—

—Well I doubt whether the same kind of thing can be said of England—but then I doubt whether we can be said to have an intellectual Left in the same sense. One could hardly put up Tony Crosland as a candidate among café philosophers...—The French didn't understand the joke.

—And even rejecting Mao—you can't ‘institutionalize happiness' —from the same people who were the students in the streets in '68!—

The journalist and the engineer singled each other out, constantly interrupted, above the heads of others.—No, it's not quite true, Glucksmann
attacks
Solzhenitsyn for saying Stalin was already contained in Marx—

—We-ell, they put up some kind of half-hearted show... I mean, of course you don't come out and say, I was wrong, we brilliant young somebodies, the new Sartres and Foucaults, our theories, our basic premises—blood and shit, that's all that's left of them in the Gulag, êh?

—Of course one shouldn't overlook that Solzhenitsyn's basic pessimism has always made him a plebeian rather than a socialist writer—

—But how will we change the world without Marx?—(The engineer admitted as if smilingly confessing to have been a football first-leaguer, although his build wouldn't credit it:—I was out in the streets in '68.—)—They do still agree it must be changed.—

—I wonder. Hardly. Even that. What have they between their legs, never mind in their heads. Political philosophers... They'll capitulate entirely to individualism. Or get religion. Either way, they'll end up with the Right.—

—Well, for a start, we must disown Marx's eldest child. La fille aînée. We must declare the Soviet Union heretic to socialism.—Bernard Chabalier joined the group; she heard the interjection among others. He had the elliptical gestures of one who has slipped back into the shoal.

—No, no, let's be clear: there's a distinction between the anti-sovietism of the right and the new anti-sovietism of the Leftist intellectuals. The Left now may
seem
to define the evils of Soviet socialism just as reactionary thought always did: pitiless dictatorship over forced labour. But what they condemn isn't the
difference between
Soviet socialism and Western liberalism—which is roughly speaking the thesis of Western liberalism and even of the enlightened Right—that's true in England ?

—M—y-es, I suppose one could say we believe we know what human rights we stand for but we don't want nationalization and unrestricted immigration of blacks. That's why the Labour Party's going to come to grief.—The French laughed with the guest of honour this time and he tailed off into vague assenting, dissimulating, scornful umphs and murmurs that dissociated him from that particular political folly.

—Neither is it the orthodox apologist thesis that what's happened to socialism in the Soviet Union has something to do with a legacy of Russian backwardness—that old stuff: her state of underdevelopment when her revolution came, the economic set-back of the war, the autocratic tradition of the Russian people and so on. The Left's theory is that if Stalin was contained in Marx, it's because the cult of the state and
la rationalité sociale
already were contained in Western thought—it's this that has infected socialism. The
phenomenon
of Gulag arose in the Soviet Union; but its
doctrine
comes from Machiavelli and Descartes—

The distinctively-modelled forehead with the fuzz of hair behind each ear tipped back, the lids dropped, intensifying the gaze.—So all that's wrong with socialism is what's wrong with the West. The fault of capitalism again—

—Let me finish—therefore the anti-sovietism of the Western Leftists is an anti-sovietism of the
Left
, quite different.—

—and let me tell you—Bernard burst through the hoop of his own irony—it's the tragedy of the Left that it can still believe all that's wrong with socialism is the West. Our tragedy as Leftists, the tragedy of our age. Socialism is the horizon of the world, Sartre has said it once and for all—but it's a blackout...close your eyes, hold your nose rather than admit where the stink is coming from.—

—The important thing surely is—

The architect's voice ran up and down themes that pleased him: —I wish I could arrange my convictions with the genius of a new
philosophe
...and they talk about Manichean...they accuse Giscard...—

—Surely the important factor is—the Englishman had drawn up his belly and lifted his chest, holding his opinions above argument—...at least these fellows may have the sense to have done with total ideas and the total repression indivisible from such ideas. When you get someone saying the twentieth century's great invention may turn out to be the concentration camp...when you start coming out with thoughts like that, we may be getting away at last from the lure of the evil utopia. If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.—

Bernard saw her, Rosa, looking at them all, at himself as one of them. Her cheekbones were taut with amazement; her presence went among them like an arm backing them away from something lost and trampled underfoot.—‘You can't institutionalize happiness'? —In all seriousness? As a discovery...? It's something from a Christmas cracker motto...—

The architect was charmingly quick-witted.—Perhaps they meant freedom, somehow they‘re—I don't know—a bit too shaken these days to use the word. In the Leftist view of life, anyway, the two are as one, more or less, aren't they, they're always insisting their ‘freedom' is the condition of happiness.—

She weighed empty hands a moment—Bernard saw what was underfoot taken up and shown there—then hid fists behind her thighs.—Don't you know ? There isn't the possibility of happiness without institutions to protect it.—

The Englishman smiled on a grille of tiny teeth holding a cigar. —God in heaven help us! And up goes the barbed wire, and who knows when you first discover which is the wrong side—

—I'm not offering a theory. I'm talking about people who need to have rights—
there
—in a statute book, so that they can move about in their own country, decide what work they'll do and what their children will learn at school. So that they can get onto a bus or walk in somewhere and order a cup of coffee.—

—Oh well, ordinary civil rights. That's hardly utopia. You don't need a revolution for that.—

—In some countries you do. People die for such things.—Bernard spoke aloud to himself.

Rosa gave no sign of having heard him.—But the struggle for change is based on the idea that freedom exists, isn't it ? That wild idea. People must be able to create institutions—institutions
must evolve
that will make it possible in practice. That utopia, it's inside...without it, how can you...act?—The last word echoed among them as ‘live', the one she had subconsciously substituted it for; there were sympathetic, embarrassed, appreciative changes in the faces, taking, amiably or as a reproach, a naive truth nevertheless granted.