Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  —What do you do when something terrible happens ?—Before he answered she spoke again, from the outline of her profile seen as the valleys and peaks of a night horizon beside him.—What would you do—nothing like that’s ever happened to you.—

  —Want to pull the world down round my ears, that’s what.—

  —Pretty useless.—

  —I don’t give a fuck about what’s ‘useful’. The will is my own. The emotion’s my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there’s no ‘we’, only ‘I’.—

  They whispered in the dark, children telling secrets. He got up and closed the window on the swaying, battering windy blackness. He kept a cassette player on the floor beside the bed, and he felt for the keys and pressed one on the tinkly, choppy surprise of Scott Joplin’s music. The gay, simple progressions climbed and strutted about the room. Her feet fidgeted under the bedclothes, slowly took on rhythm like a cat’s paws kneading. He threw back the covers and they watched the silhouettes of their waving feet, wagging like tongues, talking like hands. Soon they got up and began to dance in the dark, their shapes flying and entangling, a jigging and thumping and whirling, a giggling, gasping as mysterious as the movement of rats on the rafters, or the swarming of bees, taking shelter under the tin roof.

  The one in the church-going hat who came to hear sentence pronounced on Lionel Burger was the relative to whom the children were sent the single time when both parents were arrested together. She was a sister of Burger and she and her husband had a farm and ran the local hotel in the dorp of the same district.

  Rosa had been armed very young by her parents against the shock of such contingencies by the assumption that imprisonment was part of the responsibilities of grown-up life, like visiting patients (her father) or going to work each day in town (once her mother was banned from working as a trade unionist, she ran the buying office of a co-operative for blacks and coloureds). At eight years old Rosa could tell people the name by which the trial, in which her father and mother were two of the accused, was known, the Treason Trial, and explain that they had been refused bail which meant they couldn’t come home. Tony perhaps did not realize where they were; Auntie Velma encouraged the idea that he was ‘on holiday’ on the farm—an attitude the parents would not have thought ‘correct’ and that their daughter, resenting any deviation from her parents’ form of trust as a criticism and betrayal of them, tried to counter. But the five-year-old boy was being allowed to help make bricks: if he had lived to be a man perhaps he would never have outgrown—given up ?—this happy seclusion of what he himself was seeing, touching, feeling, from anything outside it.

  Baasie was left behind. Rosa had flown into a temper over this—the way to tears through a display of anger—but she was told by Lily Letsile that Baasie wouldn’t like to be out in the veld.

  —He would.—

  —No, he’s scared, he’s scared for the cows, the sheeps, the snakes—

  A lying singsong. Lily and Auntie Velma both used it; whereas Rosa believed her parents never lied. Baasie, the black boy almost Rosa’s age who lived with the Burger family, went to the private school run illegally by one of the Burgers’ associates that Rosa herself had attended until she was too old and had to go to the school for white girls. He was not afraid of anything except sleeping alone, Alsatian dogs, and learning how to swim. He and Rosa had often shared a bed when they were as little as Tony, they scuttled wildly together from that particular breed of dog and fought for the anchorage of wet hair on Lionel Burger’s warm breast in the cold swimming-pool. Baasie was sent to a grandmother; he did not seem to have another mother (he had Rosa’s mother, anyway) and his father, an African National Congress organizer from the Transkei, moved about too much to be able to take care of him.

  The Nel relatives lived between their farm and their hotel. Three initials and a name over the doorway to the bar and the main entrance from the hotel stoep stood for Uncle Coen. He drove back and forth from his tobacco sheds and cattle to town in a big yellow American car with rubber spats trailing to protect the chassis from mud. Auntie Velma ran the hotel office and drove very fast, in a combi with curtains tied at the waist, from hotel to farmhouse, to the railway station to pick up frozen fish for the second course on the menu, to scattered schools each Friday to fetch children, and to church on Sundays. Tony had his bricks and a cousin not yet of school-going age; Rosa gradually came to make the choice, when car or combi was going back to the farm, of staying at the hotel.

  More and more, she based herself in the two rooms marked STRICTLY PRIVATE—STRENG PRIVAAT at the end of the hotel stoep. These rooms had no numbers. There was, instead, outside one, a wooden clock-face with large hands, a wire-and-feather cuckoo, and a poker-work verse: Dear Friend—If you came and we were out/Please before you turn about/Write your name! What time you came! Do call again! COEN AND VELMA NEL. A jotter hung from a string but the pencil was missing. This device was immediately recognizable to any child as something from childhood’s own system of signification. Beyond any talisman is a private world unrelated to and therefore untouched by what is lost or gained, disappears or is substituted for, in events of which the child is at mercy. She knew a badge, a password, when she met with one. She never left the Nels’ quarters without reaching up and turning the wooden hands to the time she went out the door. (She and Baasie had been given watches for Christmas. She remembered to take hers off before getting into the bath; he had not.)

  She would disappear under the dummy cuckoo clock while running down the corridor in the middle of a game with the children of hotel guests. These children would be gone, themselves, in the morning. But no one could sleep in those two rooms STRENG PRIVAAT for one night as they did in the other rooms of the hotel, moving off early for the Kruger Park or the next stop in a commercial traveller’s lowveld round, the beds quickly stripped by the maids Selena and Elsie under lights left burning by the decamped, the early morning coffee tray and the night’s empty beer bottles standing in the corridor. Numbered rooms were all alike. All the lavatory paper was pink; each narrow bedside rug was speckled mustard-brown; between twin beds a radio was affixed to the wall and above each headboard was a coloured print showing a street scene with similar trees, taxis, people sitting drinking at little tables, and girls with high heels and poodles. Rosa read very well but the shop signs in these pictures were in a foreign language; the word she could recognize was ‘Paris’—a place far away in England, she was able to tell Selena and Elsie as she followed them round from room to room, talking above the noise of the vacuum cleaner and the radio they kept turned up while they worked.

  The two rooms where no guests were allowed in were exactly as a child would have expected, would have arranged them herself: crowded, overgrown with possessions whose origin was as individual as the standardization of hotel furnishings was anonymous, a shrine of coloured photographs of weddings and babies, souvenirs and natural curiosities. There were no books, no flowers: it was not at all like home—her father’s house—but stood in relation to the hotel as the child’s cupboard full of treasures does to its parents’ domain. The light came through windows safe with burglar-bars, cosy with the domestic lianas of net curtains and wandering philodendron. She lay on a thick carpet the colour of the red you see when you shut your eyes against sunlight and looked at women’s magazines and the Farmer’s Weekly. A parakeet with the digit of a claw missing raised the shutter of one lid then the other. A perle-lemoen-shell ashtray, a miniature Limoges teaset, a fossil fragment, tortoise carapace, black-tipped Sacred Ibis feathers someone had stuck in a Vat 69 glass filched from the bar—each was charged with associations she could feel without having to know its history; the rich clutter of private ends pursued was there, in place.

  Although no one could enter these quarters, Rosa could come and go as she pleased. With the hotel dog tittuping ahead on three legs she wandered the wide dirt streets behind the main road in the mornings. Scarcely anyone passed her; a white woman going shopping on
foot, a bicycle zigzagging. The houses, little and crabbed, with tin roofs, dark stoeps and windows that were never open, or amply haphazard with clumsy gables like dough-shapes, gave no sign of life but the clucking of chickens and the successive frenzies of dogs who, like the one who accompanied her, were all related in the common progenitor of a yappy Pomeranian-fox terrier cross. A parallel neighbourly cross-breeding of gardens produced, the length of the streets, the same blinding luxury of cerise Bougainvillaea, golden shower creeper, red hibiscus, the same pink and cream frangipani surrounded by a sweet confetti of their own flower-droppings, the same furzy tree-ferns and green-dugged pawpaw palms : the artificial ‘tropical’ gardens of smart resort hotels, elsewhere in the world. They ravelled out in mealie and pumpkin patches where the dorp ended in khakiweed and rusty metal and the veld merged with it. When she reached these quiet, wild, sleeping limits sudden rustlings aware of her—the presence of rats or snakes, once a nest of kittens that hissed and fled from her—turned her back.

  But there were landmarks. She went as far as a broken-paved space within loops of rusty chain where she puzzled over the letters carved on a stone obelisk, although she was, as Uncle Coen told her, ‘ ’n Boere meisie’ who knew her mother tongue, Afrikaans. The inscription was in Hollands, dating from the time of the Transvaal Boer Republic, commemorating the site of the first Gereformeerde Kerk in the district. Another street ended at the church to which she was taken with the Nel family on Sundays, wearing a borrowed hat. It was a new building of the kind that marked the existence of a dorp from miles away at every turn in the landscape. Its copper-covered spike stuck into the sky like a giant, gleaming, three-sided floor-nail. The street that was in line with the most direct path across the veld to the location was where old black men or women greeted her as if she were a grown-up, black children giggled and talked about her, she could tell, as they passed with a loaf or packet on their heads. Once when a group was playing some sort of tag as they sauntered, and a packet broke, she tried to help scoop up the spilt mealie meal and realized they couldn’t speak Afrikaans or English.

  She was resting, in the chair she’d discovered for herself—the solid surface roots of a marula tree, another landmark—when the old oom1 who often sat talking on the hotel stoep to whoever would listen, came by. He walked so slowly, appearing to use his stiff hip as a cane past which he dragged his other leg, that she recognized him from a long way. He stopped and spoke in Afrikaans.—What is a child doing out of school, this time ?—She could only giggle and say nothing, as the black children had done when she spoke to them.—My child! Go on, now! Go home! Your mother’s waiting. Your poor mother, waiting for you to come from school!—

  She got up and beat at her dress. The dog sniffed the old man’s trousers and jumped away, barking. She did not say to him: my mother’s in prison. How could he understand that ? The prison was down the road, just behind the police station where the flag flew. A little stone building, and in the yard at the back where the police van stood, tin sheds with barred windows. The prisoners were barefoot black men in loose shorts whom anyone could see cutting the grass with lengths of sharpened iron outside the municipal offices.

  Daniel the bar waiter who served on the stoep sat on an up-ended beer crate on the pavement when there was nobody drinking. He wore a red monkey-jacket with black grosgrain lapels that smelled strongly of sweat as he moved his arms, a bow-tie, a red-and-black forage cap, and peeling black patent shoes whose shine cracked over the strange protrusions on his feet—like Selena and Elsie, he walked to work across the dusty veld from the location every day. Rosa hopped about on the pavement, coming and going before him while they talked. She described Johannesburg, which he had never seen.—When you going back, me I’m coming there too. I’m going work for your house. Your daddy.—She told him no, Lily Letsile worked for her mother and father. He told her he had five children and would send one of the boys to work in her garden.—How old ?—

  —Oh he’s coming big. I think is nearly thirteen years now.—

  —He’ll have to go to school, not work in the garden. Children don’t work. But he’s too big to go to school with Baasie and my school’s only for girls.—

  Daniel laughed and laughed, as if she were very funny.

  Suddenly she told him:—My mother and father are in jail.—

  Daniel lowered and waggled his head, gave out grunting yelps, and screwed up one eye to pin reproach on her.—Don’t say like that about your parents. Always your parents look after you nice, send you nice school, make everything for you. Don’t say those thing.—

  The white barman had black sideburns, a bright skin, and wore a belt with a lion’s head buckle. Once he took it off and chased Tony and the cousin out of the bar when they were making a nuisance of themselves, but it was only in play. Daniel told Rosa that Baas Schutte used his belt if he found any of the waiters stealing drink; this was the sort of gossip that passed away hours, on the pavement.

  —Did you see ?—She did not quite believe anyone would hit a grown-up, although she knew some people smacked their children.

  —There in the yard! He was holding and that boy he couldn’t run away! He’s too strong, Baas Schutte!—Daniel was laughing again.

  —Which waiter?—She knew them all; they brought her her food, padding heavily in and out the swing doors from the diningroom to the kitchen with its blast of smells and noise, they gambled with bottle tops or flung themselves down to smoke in the sun outside the kitchen.

  —Jack ? Was it Jack ?—She had heard Auntie Velma having an argument with Jack about dried-up mustard in the little metal pots that stood on the tables.

  —Jack? Jack he’s not waiter for bar! How Baas Schutte can trouble for Jack ? That one he’s gone away. He won’t work here no more in town. He’s go away there to his home. He’s too frightened for Baas Schutte!—Daniel clapped his hands on his tin tray.

  Harry Schutte often took her along for the ride beside him when he drove off in the van that had the name of the hotel and ‘Off-Sales’ painted on it. Jumping down at the cartage contractor’s, the hardware store, the estate and insurance agent’s where his girl-friend worked, he seemed to forget Rosa, but would always bring her an ice-cream or a liquorice pipe. The girl-friend leaned on the van window and flirted with him through the child.—Shame, when’s your mommy coming back from overseas ? Don’t you want to come and stay by me so long ? I’ve got a nice house. Haven’t I, Harry? I’ve got two puppies...you ask Harry—

  Five weeks after she and her brother had been sent away Rosa sat on Daniel’s box while he was busy serving the people who filled the verandah tables from mid-morning on a Saturday. A party of schoolgirls voluptuous in track suits jounced down the main street on their way from a sports meeting. Black women selling mealies sat with babies crawling from under the coloured towels they wore as shawls. Farmers whose hats hid their eyes waited for wives and children who trailed and darted in and out of shops, sucking sweets and clutching parcels. Black children coming up behind humble parents were in rags or running barefoot, bundled from above the knees in school uniforms that could be afforded only once in years, so that small boys were tiny within vast clothing, and big boys wore burst and almost unrecognizable versions of the same. Young white bloods revved dust under their wheels, car radios streaming snatches of music. Black youths in token imitations of this style—a bicycle with racing handles, a transistor on a shoulder-strap, or merely a certain way of lounging against the pillars of the Greek fish-and-chip shop opposite the hotel—occasionally crossed, making the cars avoid them, to pick up cigarette butts thrown away by the hotel drinkers on the stoep. Daniel skittered and sweated; the customers climbed the steps past Rosa : huge marbled legs of a young woman who shouted to him for a double rum and coke, dainty little girls with miniature handbags sent off into the hotel hand-in-hand—Ask the boy where the toilet is. The parents sat over their beers as if they did not know each other, the grandmothers spread in their chairs like rising bread; there w
ere the fragile grandfathers to whom middle-aged daughters shouted, the sulky young girls who turned away from their families, sucking at straws with eyes narrowed in an assumption of unawareness of passing men. Farmers’ wives with cake-boxes exchanged cries of greeting over Rosa’s head. The barman’s dog ignored her in the bristling pleasure of approaching the town clerk’s Pomeranian from whose strain he was distantly sprung. All this ordered life surrounded, coated, swaddled Rosa; the order of Saturday, the order of family hierarchy, the order of black people out in the street and white people in the shade of the hotel stoep. Its flow contained her, drumming her bare heels on Daniel’s box, its voices over her head protected her. Her aunt with the confidential, comedian’s smile of a woman with a long prominent jaw was suddenly above her.—Guess what ? Mommy’s coming to fetch you.—

  At eye-level, a small boy passed holding in his fist one finger of his father’s huge hand.

  —And daddy ?—

  —Not just yet, Rosa.—

  Charges against her mother had been withdrawn. Her father was released on bail soon after she and her brother came home, and was on trial for twenty-eight months before the court quashed the indictment against him and sixty other accused out of the ninety-one committed for trial. In the Burger house there was a party, then, more joyous than any wedding, cathartic than any wake, triumphant than any stryddag held by the farmers of the Nels’ district in celebration of the white man’s power, the heritage of his people that Lionel Burger betrayed.