Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  —Some blacks shot in the back. It’s something that changed the look of everything for you, in there (indicating the house) the way firelight passes over a room in the dark. Am I supposed to believe that?—

  —But at twelve, you must have been aware—

  —Political events couldn’t ever have existed for me at that age. What shooting could compare with discovering for myself that my mother had another man ? If your father had succeeded in a conspiracy to rouse the whole population of blacks to revolution, I wouldn’t have known what hit me.—

  —What’d you do ?—

  —What does Oedipus do about two rivals ? I lay on her in daydreams at school, and when she was serving dinner I stared at her dress where her legs divided—how awful ? (she could hear in his voice the mimicry of the shocked face he imagined he could see on her in the dark)—I was mad about her; now I could be, with someone other than my father there already. I was in love; you don’t think about anything else then.—

  Two black men with a woman, arms akimbo between them, went by chattering explosively, servants at home in their white masters’ orbit of neighbourly domesticity. They did not notice or did not recognize Rosa.—Your mother—who lives in Knysna ?—

  —My mother. The same. She’s not old now but the other thing—you know, in between. Old at the roots; when her hair grows out half-an-inch white she dyes it again. Never more than half-an-inch old. She’s got a better figure than you, in trousers. Lives with my sister, that thoroughly domesticated character who has produced five children. No men around except my sister’s little fat stud. They run a pottery school, the two women. She’s always bending over the kiln, or something in the oven or grandchildren who need their noses wiped. The same one: I suppose she is.—

  The telephone had stopped ringing in the house. Rosa knew by some faint lack of distraction in her ears. Somebody living there now had picked it up.

  —Got a match ?—She did not smoke.

  He paused a second, took out his lighter with thumb scuffing to ignite it. As if guided, he passed the small illumination across the plaque of dimensions that did not cover exactly the whitish square on the brick gateway: the baked enamel profile of a fierce dog, warning emblem of the installation of a burglar alarm system.

  —What happened then—

  —Nothing happened—not as things were always happening in that house.—They turned away from it, under the pavement trees. —Some of us knew, and some didn’t, I suppose. I think our girl did and that gave her a hold over my mother, the white missus was afraid of someone... I think I saw that in the way my mother treated her, always flattering her a bit. That’s how you learn about power, from things like that. Poor ma. I didn’t think of her body any more because I became fascinated by the electrical points in the house.—

  The street-lights lost and found them at regular intervals, the street gave way to another.—I knew from one of those kid’s kits I got one Christmas or birthday—no, I suppose I was doing physics at school by then—how quickly two-twenty volts pass through your body. Just a second’s contact. You don’t have to grasp or thrust. It’s not like sticking a knife, or definite as pulling a trigger. Just a touch. I used to stand looking at that brown bakelite thing for minutes at a time: all you have to do is switch on and stick your fingers in the holes. A terrible fear and temptation.—

  Their voices rose and fell alone in the cottage. A few steps out into the wilderness and the surge of cicadas mastered, obliterated them as the darkness did their bodies between street-lights; at certain times of day the rise of traffic from the freeways by which they were almost surrounded swirled, isolating words like the cries of birds where the tide engulfs a promontory.

  —Didn’t you ever imagine killing something, just because it was small and weak ? You know how you’re obsessed with the possibility of death when you’re adolescent. A rabbit that was afraid of you ? Somebody’s baby you admired in a pram ? What it would be like—so easy—to hurt it as a punishment for its helplessness? Rosa ? Haven’t you even noticed the look of a kid’s face sometimes, when it gazes at the infant lying there. A little head you could imagine crushing, while never being able to hurt anything ? When you were a kid ? What did you make of those feelings ?—

  Once she appealed, half-angry.—Conrad, you won’t believe it. It’s like saying to someone you never masturbated. I don’t know that I ever had them.—

  —The day somebody said look, that’s Rosa Burger...from the first time...I have the impression you’ve grown up entirely through other people. What they told you was appropriate to feel and do. How did you begin to know yourself ? You go through the motions... what’s expected of you. What you’ve come to rely on.—

  She had taken on a way of sitting up very straight, at once resistant and yet alert to the point of strain. She did not need to look at him.

  —I don’t know how else to put it. Rationality, extraversion...but I want to steer clear of terms because that’s what I’m getting at: just words; life isn’t there. The tension that makes it possible to live is created somewhere else, some other way.—

  Sometimes she parried, insulting in her return to the manner of one who could not be reached by someone like him.

  —In the I Ching.—

  —That crap.—The girl he slept with carried the book as her breviary.

  —According to Jung, then.—A book beside the bed.

  —But there’s something there for you, never mind! One day when he was a kid Jung imagined God sitting up in the clouds and shitting on the world below. His father was a pastor... You commit the great blasphemy against all doctrine, and you begin to live...—

  —What tension are you talking about ? Why tension ?—

  —The tension between creation and destruction in yourself.—Rosa, lips together, breathing fast, the look of someone struggling with anger, dismay or contempt.—Wandering between your fantasies and obsessions.—

  —Yes, fantasies, obsessions. They’re mine. They’re the form in which the question of my own existence is being put to me. From them come the marvels (in that gesture he had from some bar- or bible-thumping ancestor he put the flat of his hand, hard, on Borges’ poems she had been reading), the real reasons why you won’t kill and perhaps why you can go on living. Saint-Simon and Fourier and Marx and Lenin and Luxemburg whose namesake you are—you can’t get that from them.—

  When he began to talk (he who had no conversation among other people) she would lose mental grip of what she was occupied with, keeping still and quiet as if to attract something that might approach her. Her hands told the beads of repetitive gesture. Her feet and calves went numb beneath her weight but she did not get up from her place on the floor, the continuance of a sensation holding a train of lucidity.

  —Of course I wanted to kill myself. I believed I ought to kill myself for fucking my mother. That’s clear and easy to you and me. No difference, when it comes to guilt, between what you’ve done and what you’ve imagined. But I had no idea...I didn’t know the connection existed.—

  —You poor little devil.—

  —No no no. Rosa, I’m telling the truth about what matters. This was just one of the ways I happened to come to reaching the realities: sex and death. Everything else is ducking away.—

  She raked the four fingers of her left hand through the stiff, dirty pile of the old carpet, again and again.

  —You saw someone dead when you were little.—

  —No. Oh a dog or cat. Birds we killed at school, with a catapult. Or at least they did—others. I gave up.—

  She smiled.—Why—

  —They didn’t sing any more.—

  —So you chose the ‘joy of living’.—

  —In my way. Being told it was cruel certainly hadn’t stopped me.—

  Somewhere down in the wilderness outside the cottage the roadmakers had an equipment dump, with mounds of small stones, upturned wheelbarrows treacled with tar, poles and trestles and lanterns for barricades. There was a hut made
of sheets of lead ceiling and loose bricks from the demolished mansion. The watchman’s brazier, pierced with triangular red eyes at night, smoked through half-bald pepper trees and velour-leafed loquats during the day; outlaw cats waited to streak upon the crusts of burned mealie-meal from the big black pot without a handle that belched on the coals. The sounds of a camp established the direction of the place; there were always hangers-on gathered around him. Rosa came upon the curious stance of the back of a drunk man peeing against a tree; or the cat, sensing the presence of some menace from its own kind, suddenly pinned in thin air an uncompleted gambol.

  The watchman gave Conrad money to place bets at the race-course. The man came regularly to the cottage in the late afternoons ; he took off his yellow oilskin hat and asked for the master. If Conrad were not there but might be back soon, Rosa invited him to come in but such a suggestion was incomprehensible to him, he understood it only as the established procedure for approaching a white man’s house; sat on the broken step that was all that remained of five that had once led to the verandah, and waited until the white man came.

  Conrad squatted down with him there. He read out the names of horses and the odds quoted and the watchman interrupted with throat-noises of assent or sometimes let silences of indecision hold, after Conrad had paused, expecting assent. Conrad pushed the man’s paper money into the pocket of his jeans, from which he would use it as ready cash; apparently he took its equivalent from his earnings at the race-course when actually placing the bets at the tote. The watchman giggled with falsetto joy as he was paid out a win. He would take the young white man by the wrist, the shoulder, good fortune made flesh. He would ask, as of right, for a beer. Conrad laughed.—He should be standing me.—

  She brought the beer cans.—You’re the fount from which all blessings flow.—

  Once the black man was emboldened by happiness to talk to her. —Your brother is very clever. I like such a clever one like him.—

  —What happens when that watchman loses his money ?—

  —It’s gone. That’s all.—

  —He can’t afford the risk.—

  —He can’t afford the kick he gets out of winning, either.—

  When they went among Conrad’s friends she talked easily and he was almost as withdrawn as he was when they encountered the Burger faction. One of his friends was building a sailing ship in a backyard. Rosa laughed with pleasure at the incongruous sight, rearing up between a dog kennel, a garage, and the servant’s room where the bed raised on bricks could be seen through the open door. Conrad studied diagrams and charts relating to the ship’s construction and the seas on the route proposed. Apparently the idea was that he would navigate from island to island across the Indian Ocean to Australia. The friend looked up at her, casually generous. —Come along.—

  —Oh I’d love to. You could drop me off at Dar es Salaam to see my brother.—

  It was a game, pretending she had a passport, referring to the son of her father’s first marriage, whom she had never seen, as her sibling; her polite fantasy to make herself acceptable among these people absorbed in planing wild-smelling wood and sewing bunk covers. Like a temptation, she returned to its conventions while she and Conrad were cutting each other’s hair in the bathroom of the cottage. He had read aloud a poem Baudelaire wrote about Mauritius, translating for her.

  —André and his girl have it all out of a manual. I think I’d be scared to go all that way to sea with only one person aboard who knows anything about sailing.—

  —So what ? You’re not scared to stay at home and go to prison.—

  She held his head steady to gauge the evenness of the hair-level over the ears. He let her snip towards his lobes.

  She took his place on the lid of the lavatory seat. He put round her shoulders the towel furred with his hair, the pale colour and rough as the nap of sacking.—Close your eyes.—

  She felt the cold little metal beak along her forehead.—Not too much. Don’t scalp me.—

  —Don’t worry. You look okay. You’ll survive.—

  She spoke with a change of key.—Why should I go to prison ?—

  —Well you will, won’t you. Sooner or later.—

  Her eyes were closed against the falling hair.—If Lionel and my mother...if the concepts of our life, our relationships, we children accepted from them were those of Marx and Lenin, they’d already become natural and personal by the time they reached me. D’you see ? It was all on the same level at which you—I—children learn to eat with a knife and fork, go to church if their parents do, use the forms of address by which the parents’ attitudes—respect, disapproval, envy, whatever—towards people are expressed. I was the same as every other kid.—

  —You were not. You are not. Not my kind of kid.—

  —You were exceptional. From what you’ve told me.—

  —No. Go to church if the parents do. Exactly. You’re all atheists, yes ? But being brought up in a house like your father’s is growing up in a devout family. Perhaps nobody preached Marx or Lenin... They just lay around the house, leather-bound with gold tooling, in everybody’s mind—the family bible. It was all taken in with your breakfast cornflakes. But the people who came to your house weren’t there for tea-parties with your mother or bridge evenings with cigars. They weren’t your father’s golf-playing fellow doctors or ladies your mother went shopping with, ay ?—They came together to make a revolution. That was ordinary, to you. That—intention. It was ordinary. It was the normal atmosphere in that house.—

  —You have the craziest ideas about that house.—She was brought up short by her own use of the definition ‘that house’, distancing the private enclosures of her being.

  —Keep still. You’ll be nicked.—

  —You seem to think people go around talking revolution as if they were deciding where to go for their summer holidays. Or which new car to buy. You romanticize.—The cartilage of her nostrils stiffened. The patient manner patronized him, displayed the deceptive commonplace that people accustomed to police harassment use before the uninitiated.

  —I don’t mean in so many words—their preoccupations supposed the revolution must be achieved; the scale of what mattered and what didn’t, what moved you and didn’t, in your life every day, presupposed it. Didn’t it ?—

  She had stayed the attack of the scissors, holding up almost aggressively a jagged piece of mirror to see what he was taking off her nape hair. She was murmuring, complaining of him without attentive coherence.—I went to school, I had my friends, our place was always full of people who did all sorts of different jobs and talked about everything under the sun...you were there once, you saw—

  —What’d you celebrate in your house ? The occasions were when somebody got off, not guilty, in a political trial. Leaders came out of prison. A bunch of blacks made a success of a boycott or defied a law. There was a mass protest or a march, a strike... Those were your nuptials and fiestas. When blacks were shot by the police, when people were detained, when leaders went to jail, when new laws shifted populations you’d never even seen, banned and outlawed people, those were your mournings and your wakes. These were the occasions you were taught (precept and example, oh I know that, nothing authoritarian about your father) were the real ones, not your own private kicks and poor little ingrown miseries. —But where are they, those miseries, and your great wild times ? I look at you...—

  —Oh there were parties, all right... Christmas trees, weddings. People had affairs with other people’s wives...—You don’t have a corner on that. I don’t know about my mother and father—I doubt it. Although Lionel was very attractive to women. You probably saw that at the trial—I think most good doctors are....There were terrible rows and antagonisms between people...—

  —But between the faithful; yes, political ones.—

  She continued her list.—And there were deaths.—

  In the middle of the night, he began to speak.

  —But isn’t it true—you had your formula for deali
ng with that, too.—

  She lay and listened to the seething and sweeping of the bauhinia tree against the tin roof.

  —Isn’t it ? A prescribed way to deal with the frail and wayward flesh that gets sick and wasted and drowns. Some people scream and beat their breasts, others try to follow into the next world, table-tapping and so on. Among you, the cause is what can’t die. Your mother didn’t live to carry it on, others did. The little boy, your brother didn’t grow up to carry it on, others will. It’s immortality. If you can accept it. Christian resignation’s only one example. A cause more important than an individual is another. The same con, the future in place of the present. Lives you can’t live, instead of your own. You didn’t cry when your father was sentenced. I saw. People said how brave. Some people say, a cold fish. But it’s conditioning, brain-washing : more like a trained seal, maybe.—