Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  She returned before dark with an unhealthy-looking fair man with long hair and a straggling moustache, wearing the fashionable garb of shirt with Balkan embroidery, jeans, and veldskoen. He had a screwdriver but found some difficulty in turning it in the grooves caked with layers of metal polish turned to stony verdigris. She did not get out of the driver’s seat. The oblong where the plate had been showed whitish in the twilight. He put the plate in the boot of her car and they drove away.

  Rosa was allowed one prison visit every two months for the first year, while her father was a ‘D’ grade prisoner. She received from him, and wrote in return, one letter a month not longer than the regulation 500 words. When she exceeded this limit by a sentence, the page was cut at that point by the Chief Warder, who censored prisoners’ mail. Her father told her, at her next visit, how he had amused himself trying to construct from the context of the preceding sentence what the missing part would have added. In the July and October of that year, she did not write in order to let her half-brother from her father’s first marriage, a doctor working in Tanzania and a prohibited immigrant in South Africa, send a letter. During the second year, her father became a ‘C’ grade prisoner and was allowed several special visits. Application to take advantage of these visits by Flora Donaldson and Dick Terblanche (Ivy was in prison but her husband’s ban had lapsed and had not yet been renewed) were turned down by the Director of Prisons, as was that of an old comrade, Professor Jan Hahnloser, who thought Lionel Burger had foolishly and tragically thrown his life away for political beliefs now long become abhorrent to the professor, but found in the tragedy the necessity to assert the bonds of youthful friendship. The Director did allow a Christmas visit from the aunt and uncle—her father’s sister and brother-in-law, a farmer and his wife who had been present in court for the verdict at his trial. It was in the autumn of the second year, when she was allowed to see her father every alternate week, that one of her visits was to the prison hospital because he had the first of the virus throat infections that kept recurring.

  She shared a flat for a time with Mark Liebowitz’s sister Rhoda, just divorced. Then her flat-mate, the organizing secretary of a mixed trade union of coloureds and whites, began a love affair with a coloured trade unionist and went to Cape Town to be where the man lived even though she couldn’t live with him. Rosa disliked the smells of other people’s frying that never left the corridors and the noise of other people’s radios that gabbled in under the flat door; now she was able to move. She lived with Flora Donaldson and her husband—he was away in Europe on business half the year. It was a house—open house—like their own—her father’s—had been; big rooms, with flowers from the garden, friendly talkative servants about, books, pictures, guests, a swimming-pool. She tried a flat again; a small flat, on her own. What she really wanted was a garden cottage. Once she thought she had just what was in mind and then the owners realized who she was and sidled out of the agreement. As they were not open about their reasons she could not tell them the police seemed to be leaving her alone since her father had been serving his sentence. She had not been raided once, in the various places she had lived.

  She still had her job at the hospital; she worked mostly in geriatric wards, and with children. Her half-brother wrote from northern Tanzania that if only he had her in his hospital...there was no money, no time, no personnel to provide physiotherapy for anyone. She could have gone to work with a doctor friend among rural Africans in the Transkei who needed her kind of skills just as badly—it would have been possible to fly up twice a month for the prison visits—but the Administrator of the territory knew who she was and would not give her permission to live in a black ‘homeland’. As it happened, her father’s tendency to throat infections appeared to become chronic and she had to be there—at the prison to insist on medical reports from the Commandant; negotiating through Theo for a private specialist to see her father; importuning various officials—available to her father even if she could not see him. She played squash twice a week for the exercise. She went to the theatre when there was anything worthwhile. At parties her bared flesh was as sunburned as anyone’s who had long summer holidays at the sea; she did go away from town for a week once or twice, and apparently with a Swedish journalist with whom (it was understood not even her close friends would ever expect information from Rosa herself) she was having a love affair. She took from her father’s ex-receptionist one of the kittens produced by the old black cat and set it up with a sand-box in the bathroom of the flat. It was noted that the Swede wore a gold ring, in the custom of married men from Europe. Family friends and associates of her father’s generation wished she would get married, to some South African, locally; but no one would have presumed to express this kindly concern to her—of course it was understood she could never leave, leave the country as so many did, now that her father was in prison and she was the only one left to him.

  In November, in the second month of the third year of his life sentence, Lionel Burger developed nephritis as a result of yet another throat infection and died in prison.

  The prison authorities did not consent to a private funeral arranged by relatives. His life sentence was served but the State claimed his body. A thousand black and white people had come to the funeral of Cathy Burger, his wife and Rosa’s mother, some years before. At a memorial gathering in honour of Lionel Burger held one lunch-hour in a small trades hall few of the faces recognized then were to be seen again—the black and Indian and coloured and white leaders gone to prison or exile, or restricted by bans from attending meetings of any nature. Two or three men and women who had been hidden away by house arrest for many years appeared on the platform like actors making a come-back with the style and rhetoric of their time. Some young people present asked who they were ? There were babies in arms, and restless children. A tiny Indian boy was given an apple to quiet him. If there were Special Branch men present, they were unobtrusive despite the small number of people, and difficult to spot under the cultivated shabbiness of young white intellectuals and impassively distanced air of black clerks and delivery-men they might have assumed. When the valedictions had been delivered and people were rising from their broken wooden seats, the same tiny boy, seen to have been placed standing on his by his mother, lifted a clenched toy fist and yelled in the triumph with which a child performs a nursery rhyme with exactly the intonation in which he has been rehearsed, Amandhla ! Amandhla ! Amandhla ! Faltering response gathered from the sparse crowd trooping out: Awethu ! Seeing he had done well, he scrambled down among people’s feet to retrieve his half-eaten apple. A man who hung around the magistrates’ courts to take cut-price wedding pictures and worked part-time for the Special Branch was waiting in the street to photograph everyone leaving the hall.

  But people closed around Rosa Burger at the exit; some, with delicacy or embarrassment, pressed her hand and said they would come and see her—nearly three years is a long time and many had lost touch. She looked different, not only in the way in which those to whom terrible events come have faces that are hard to look upon. Her hair was cut very short, curly as the head of a Mediterranean or Cape Town urchin, making the tendons of her neck appear longer and more strained than a young woman’s should. There was her father’s smile for everybody. But a number of people found they did not know where to reach her, now; she was no longer in her flat: another name was up on the door. Others explained—yes, they’d heard she had found a cottage in somebody’s garden, she had moved away, there was no telephone yet. It takes a little time to establish a new point of reference, even cartographically, among a circle of friends. One could always try to reach her at the hospital. Some did, and she came to Sunday lunch. She said the cottage was somewhere in the old part of town near the zoo—a very temporary arrangement; she had not made up her mind what she would do, now. The Terblanches asked if she wouldn’t apply again for permission to go to the Transkei.—Why not Tanzania—to brother David! Why not ? Maybe they’re in the mood to relent and giv
e you a passport, now.—Flora Donaldson’s husband, who was usually silent in the company of her friends because he was not a political associate, suddenly turned on his wife, reversing the position in which he was expected to make the blunders.—Don’t be absurd, Flora.—His whole body and face seemed dislocated by insult to Rosa Burger as he moved unnecessarily about the room.—Oh William, what do you know about the issues involved.——In my ignorance, it seems, a lot more than you do.—

  The girl said nothing, tolerantly uninterested in a marital spat at table. But that afternoon she asked William Donaldson whether he would give her a chance to beat him at a game of tennis—it had been a joke, when she stayed with the Donaldsons, that although he played assiduously at some businessmen’s sports club to keep fit, he never won a set with anyone but her.

  After her father’s death, unless the old circle got in touch with Rosa they saw even less of her. The Swede had disappeared; either she must have broken off the affair or he had gone back to Sweden ? When anyone did encounter her she often had in tow some young man who looked like a student radical, or fancied himself as a painter or writer—to people of her father’s generation he appeared Bohemian, to her contemporaries not much more than a moody dropout and younger than she was. He could perhaps have been a relation, her father’s was a big Transvaal family. She could have been keeping an eye on him in town, or offering him a bed for a while. When together they met friends of the Burgers she seemed pleased and animated to chat, and forgot him in his presence; his name was Conrad Something-or-other.

  Now you are free.

  I don’t know that you said it to me or whether I thought it in your presence. It came to me when I was with you; it came from being with you.

  I went to the cottage because it was the place of a stranger who said: any time... The others, my father’s good friends and comrades, would have been too pressingly understanding and demandingly affectionate. They didn’t want me to feel alone, I didn’t want to be alone in the flat, but these were not the same thing. You had said long before that if I ever needed a place, I could use that cottage. The suggestion had nothing to do with the death of Lionel. You didn’t repeat it after he died. You yourself took what you needed. You used my car. You asked me for money and I didn’t ask what the need was. You slept while I was at work and if you were out at night I cooked and ate by myself; the bauhinia tree was in flower and bees it attracted were in the roof, like a noise in the head.

  Now you are free.

  Conrad went off some evenings for Spanish lessons and sometimes came back with the girl who taught him. Those nights he spent in the livingroom; Rosa, going to work in the morning, stepped round the two of them rumpled among the old cushions and kaross on the floor like children overcome by sleep in the middle of a game.

  Conrad and Rosa were often in that same livingroom together on Sundays. The yoghurt and fruit of a late breakfast was supplemented from time to time as she would push onto a plate cold leftovers from the fridge and he would fetch a can of beer and bread covered with peanut butter. Now and then it was bread he himself had made.

  The cat she had brought with her skittered among the loose sheets of his thesis buried under Sunday papers.—Shall I put these somewhere safe or put the cat out ?—

  They both laughed at the question implied. The room filled up with his books and papers, his Spanish grammars, his violin and musical scores, records, but in this evidence of activity he lay smoking, often sleeping. She read, repaired her clothes, and wandered in the wilderness outside from which she collected branches, pampas grass feathers, fir cones, and once gardenias that heavy rain had brought back into bloom from the barrenness of neglect.

  Sometimes he was not asleep when he appeared to be.—What was your song ?—

  —Song ?—Squatting on the floor cleaning up crumbs of bark and broken leaf.

  —You were singing.—

  —What ? Was I ?—She had filled a dented Benares brass pot with loquat branches.

  —For the joy of living.—

  She looked to see if he were making fun of her.—I didn’t know.—

  —But you never doubted it for a moment. Your family.—She did not turn to him that profile of privacy with which he was used to meeting.—Suppose not.—

  —Disease, drowning, arrests, imprisonments.—He opened his eyes, almond-shaped and glazed, from ostentatious supine vulnerability. —It didn’t make any difference.—

  —I haven’t thought about it. No. In the end, no difference.—An embarrassed, almost prim laugh.—We were not the only people alive.—She sat on the floor with her feet under her body, thighs sloping forward to the knees, her hands caught between them.

  —I am the only person alive.—

  She could have turned him away, glided from the territory with the kind of comment that comes easily: How modestly you dispose of the rest of us.

  But he had a rudder-like instinct that resisted deflection—A happy family. Your house was a happy one. There were the Moscow trials and there was Stalin—before you and I were even born—there was the East Berlin uprising and there was Czechoslovakia, there’re the prisons and asylums filled with people there like your father here. Communists are the last optimists.—

  —... My brother, my mother: what’s that got to do with politics—things like that happen to anybody.—

  He moved crossed arms restlessly, his hands clinically palpating his pectoral muscles.—That’s it. To anyone—they knock the wind out of anyone. They mean everything... In the end no one cares a stuff who’s in jail or what war’s on, so long as it’s far away. But the Lionel Burgers of this world—personal horrors and political ones are the same to you. You live through them all. On the same level. And whatever happens—no matter what happens—

  She was waiting, turned away from him, jaw touching her hunched shoulder in listening obstinacy.

  He started to speak and stopped, dissatisfied. At last he settled for it with a strange expression of effort round his hair-outlined mouth; as if he stomached something of both the horrors and his own wonder.—Christ. You. Singing under your breath. Picking flowers.—

  She drew her hands from between her thighs and looked at the palms, so responsible and unfamiliar a part of herself, as if they had acted without her volition. The words came from her in the same way.—Nothing more than animal survival, perhaps.—

  He disappeared from time to time, once brought from Swaziland a wooden bowl and a piece of naive wood-carving. The bowl held the sleeping cat or his bread-dough left to rise, the red and black bird was set up where he could see it when he woke in the mornings. When Lionel Burger’s big car was sold there was only her Volkswagen, and he assumed use of it, waiting to pick her up outside the hospital without a spoken greeting. Sometimes, not having discussed the intention, they spent evenings in cinemas or, strolling out into the wilderness round the tin cottage, kept walking for miles through the suburbs.

  On such a night they walked past her father’s house. As she approached it, a passer-by, her tread slowed. Her companion’s pace dropped to hers. The lights were on in the upstairs rooms for him to see but only she knew that the watermarks of light behind the dark windows of the livingroom came from a window in the passage to which the inner door must have been left ajar. Only she, her ear accustomed to separating its pitch from all other sounds, could hear that across the garden, beyond the walls, the upstairs telephone was ringing in its place in her mother’s room.

  He was at ease in the streets as children or black men. A fist knocked on the trunk of the pavement tree they stood under, a caress for its solidity.—How old were you and I when Sharpeville happened ?—

  No one answered the telephone still ringing, still ringing, not her mother, Lily clopping upstairs in shoes whose backs were bent under her spread heels, old Kowalski obliging, Lionel, herself. —Twelve. About.—

  —Just twelve. D’you remember ?—

  —Of course I remember.—

  —I know what I’ve read, that�
��s all.—

  Shifting stains of leaf-shadows over their bodies and faces made the movement of air something seen instead of felt, as in place of feeling her habitation about her, she saw her own shell.

  —I suppose in that house there was outrage.—In the dark and half-dark each was a creature camouflaged by suburban vegetation. —Your favourite expression.—

  —Lionel found out they’d been shot in the back. I asked my mother and she explained...but I didn’t understand what it meant, the difference if you were hit in the back or chest. Someone we knew well, Sipho Mokoena—he was there when it happened and he came straight to us, my father was called from his consulting rooms —Sipho wasn’t hurt, his trouser-leg was ripped by a bullet. I’d imagined (from cowboy films ?) a bullet went right through you and there would be two holes...both the same...but when I heard my father asking him so many questions, then I understood that what mattered was you could see which side and from which level a bullet came. Lionel had ways of getting in touch with people who worked at the hospital where the wounded had been taken—the press wasn’t allowed near. I woke up very late at night, it must have been three in the morning when he came back and everyone was with my mother in our diningroom, I remember the dishes still on the table, she’d made food for people. They didn’t go to bed at all. The ANC leaders were there, and the lawyers, Gifford Williams and someone else—it was urgent to go out and get sworn statements from witnesses so that if there was going to be an inquiry what really happened would come out, it wouldn’t just be a State cover-up... PAC people—Tsolo and his men were the ones who’d actually organized that particular protest against passes at the Sharpeville police station, but that didn’t matter, what happened had gone far beyond political rivalry. When I got up again for school Lionel was already shut in with other people, he hadn’t had any sleep. Lily gave me a tray of coffee to take to them, and they’d forgotten to turn off the lights in the daylight.—The sort of thing that sticks in your mind when you’re a child.—Tony and I kept asking Sipho to show us where his trousers were torn. Sipho said how when the police were loading the dead into vans he had to ask them to take the brains as well—the brains of a man with a smashed head spilled and they left them in the road. My mother got agitated and took Tony out of the room. He was yelling and kicking, he didn’t want to go. But I heard how Sipho said they sent a black policeman to pick up the brains with a shovel.—