Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  Now you are free. The knowledge that my father was not there ever, any more, that he was not simply hidden away by walls and steel grilles; this disembowelling childish dolour that left me standing in the middle of them all needing to whimper, howl, while I could say nothing, tell nobody: suddenly it was something else. Now you are free.

  I was afraid of it: a kind of discovery that makes one go dead-cold and wary.

  What does one do with such knowledge?

  Flora Donaldson’s bossy joy in managing other people’s lives saw me taking off for another country: always in Africa, of course, because wasn’t that where my father had earned the right for us to belong ? Wasn’t that our covenant, whatever happened to us there ? You saw me in prison. Matter-of-factly, eventually, inevitably. For you, I could not be visualized leaving, living any other life than the one necessity—political necessity ?—had made for me so far. You with your navel-fluff-picking hunt for ‘individual destiny’: didn’t you understand, everything that child, that girl did was out of what is between daughter and mother, daughter and brother, daughter and father. When I was passive, in that cottage, if you had known—I was struggling with a monstrous resentment against the claim—not of the Communist Party!—of blood, shared genes, the semen from which I had issued and the body in which I had grown. I stand outside the prison with an eiderdown and hidden messages for my mother. Tony is dead and there is no other child but me, for her. Two hundred and seventeen days with the paisley scarf in my pocket, while the witnesses came in and out the dock condemning my father. My mother is dead and there is only me, there, for him. Only me. My studies, my work, my love affairs must fit in with the twice-monthly visits to the prison, for life, as long as he lives—if he had lived. My professors, my employers, my men must accept this overruling. I have no passport because I am my father’s daughter. People who associate with me must be prepared to be suspect because I am my father’s daughter. And there is more to it, more than you know—what I wanted was to take a law degree, but there was no point; too unlikely that, my father’s daughter, I should be allowed to practise law, so I had to do something else instead, anything, something that would pass as politically innocuous, why not in the field of medicine, my father’s daughter. And now he is dead! Dead! I prowled about that abandoned garden, old Lolita’s offspring caught Hottentot Gods in the grass that had taken over the tennis court, and I knew I must have wished him to die; that to exult and to sorrow were the same thing for me.

  We had in common such terrible childish secrets, in the tin house: you can fuck your mother, and wish your father dead.

  There is more to it. More than you guessed or wormed out of me in your curiosity and envy, talking when the lights were out, more than I knew, or wanted to know until I came to listen to you, unable to stop, although the shape of your feet held by the sweat in your discarded socks, the doubt whether the money in the two-finger-pocket with the button missing at the waist of your jeans always went where the watchman trusted it to—these venial familiarities of the body’s exuding or the mind’s deviousness were repugnant to although loyally not criticized or revealed by me. So it was when my brother Tony pinched stamps from my father’s desk and sold them at a cent or two in excess of the post office price to the servants round about who wrote to their homes in Malawi and Moçambique, or when he gave himself away by farting with anguish whenever he lied, poor little boy.—The Saturday morning Tony drowned I saw him bringing his friends to swim and I told him not to show off and dive. He promised, but I could smell him.

  Still more to it than you knew. My Swede, that Marcus whose name you didn’t bring up because you thought it would be painful for me was of no importance, whether he went away or stayed. What was there between us—as the language of emotional contract puts it ? That’s easy. He wanted to make a film about my father, in Stockholm. It was going to be a collage of documentary evidence of events and fictional links, with an actor playing the part of my father. I had to look at photographs of Swedish actors and say which I thought would come closest to suggesting Lionel Burger. Because of course Marcus could never see him. Not even as he was then, in prison. We went together one weekend to a Transvaal dorp, for me to show the sort of environment in which my father grew up. We also went together to Cape Town because my father was at the medical school there as a student. That wasn’t the reason the Swede gave to the principal. He got into the School to take some footage by telling everyone he was making a film about South Africa’s wonderful heart transplants. But the real reason for going to Cape Town was not even the one we concealed, the real reason was to make love at the sea. He had that sexual passion for nature I imagine is peculiarly Northern. Something to do with too much cold and darkness, and then the short period when there is no night and they don’t sleep at all. He called it ‘dragon-fly summer’, just like one long, extraordinary, bright day in which to live a complete life-cycle.

  We take nature more easily, the sun’s always here. Except in prison; even in Africa, prisons are dark. Lionel said how the sun never came into his cell, only the coloured reflection of some sunsets, that would make a parallelogram coated with delicate pearly light, broken by the interruption of the bars, on the wall opposite his window.

  The Swede had buttocks tanned as his back and legs—all of a unity, as if his body had no secrets. He was beautiful. And whether or not I am, he felt the same about me and could coax from me—that is the only way to describe the pride and appreciation, the simplicity of his patience and skill—three orgasms, one after the other, each pleasuring spreading to the limits of the spent one like the water touching to its own tidemarks on the sand. This had never happened to me before. And he wrote to me, when Lionel died. He said he would try to show a rough cut of the unfinished film if the Scandinavian anti-apartheid group held a memorial meeting. He had offered to try through his wife’s connections to get a passport for me, abroad, if ever I could leave. Perhaps, from his safety, from his welfare state where left-wing groups were like mothers’ unions or Rotary Clubs, and left-wing views did not imply any endangering action, being the lover of Lionel Burger’s daughter for a month or two was the nearest he would ever get to the barricades. I don’t mind. What else was I ?

  I told you how my ‘engagement’ to Noel de Witt was a device to enable him to be kept in touch with when he was in prison. You said with that insistent prurience with which people are curious about that with which they want nothing to do, You mean the underground Communist movement. They used you to keep in touch with him ?

  Yes of course, it was the obvious, an excellent idea, everyone decided.

  —In that house ?—

  Yes of course, our house; it was natural, no one could suspect otherwise. Noel was one of my father’s known associates, he practically lived with us anyway, nothing extraordinary in his supposed to be going to marry Lionel Burger’s daughter. And his fiancée had the same privileges as a prisoner’s wife has—visits, letters and so on. Without me he would have had no one; he was half-Portuguese, his mother prohibited entry to South Africa because she was a Frelimo sympathizer who had been arrested by the Portuguese at one time, his father disappeared somewhere in Australia. Who would there have been to bring him books and writing paper ? My mother and father knew what these things mean when you’re inside —the sight of a face that signals the outside still exists, a face whose associations assume that others are carrying on with what has to be done. And even the ingenuity, the blandly-outwitting joke played on the Director of Prisons, who cannot refuse permission for an ‘engaged’ girl to see her boy, the warders who feel a sneaking empathy even with a Commie when he gazes at his girl across the barrier in the visiting room—that gave confidence. That was one of the satisfactions you didn’t have on the list of our pleasures in that house—outsmarting the police. Noel entered gaily into the spirit of the thing. When he noticed the ring that had appeared on my finger for the first visit, he kept asking me whether I was quite sure I liked it ? Quite, quite sure ?—with
all the basking persuasiveness of one who has chosen, he knows, exactly what his darling would want. The ring I wore my mother got from Aletta Gous, remembering that Aletta would rummage for just the right thing—a mean little round diamond thrust up on a mound of filigree steel-coloured metal, indispensable piece of equipment for the dorp betrothal. I don’t think it was a fake; somewhere in the nineteen-thirties Aletta had been a young girl in a country town and had nearly married the young man who ran his father’s garage and was an usher in the church of a Dutch Reformed sect called the Pinksters. When she outcast herself by running away to the city and taking part in street-corner meetings of the Communist Party, perhaps she flaunted her jaunty contempt for the broken bourgeois convention by keeping its flimsy shackle.

  Mine is the face and body when Noel de Witt sees a woman once a month. If anybody in our house—that house, as you made it appear to me—understood this, nobody took it into account. My mother was alive then. If she saw, realized—and at least she might have considered the possibility—she didn’t choose to see. Alone in the tin cottage with you, when I had nothing more to tell you, when I had shut up, when I didn’t interrupt you, when you couldn’t get anything out of me, when I wasn’t listening, I accused her. I slashed branches in the suburban garden turned rubbish dump where I was marooned with you. Weeds broke rank where I tramped over twists of newspaper smeared with human shit, bottles and rags cast among the scented shrubs where tennis balls used to be lost. I accused him—Lionel Burger, knowing as he did, without question, I would do what had to be done.

  Every month I was told what must be communicated in the guise of my loving prison letter. At night, sitting up in bed in my old room in that house, smoking cigarettes at that time, not yet eighteen, I rewrote each 500 words again and again. I didn’t know, ever, whether I had succeeded in writing with the effect of a pretence (for him to read as such) what I really felt about Noel so tenderly and passionately. The dates when my duty visits to him were marked on the calendar behind my bedroom door were approached by the ticking off of days in my handbag diary in which (well trained) I never wrote anything that could provide a clue to my life. On the night before the day itself finally arrived I washed my hair; before leaving for the prison I trickled perfume between my breasts and cupped some to rub on my belly and thighs. I chose a dress that showed my legs, or trousers and a shirt that emphasized my femaleness with their sexual ambiguity. Scent me out, sniff my flesh. Find me, receive me. And all this with an unthinking drive of need and instinct that could be called innocent and that you call ‘real’. I took a flower with me. Usually the warders would not accept it for him (now and then the sentimentality of one of them for ‘sweethearts’, or the vicarious sexual stir another got from pandering, would move him to pass the gift). I kept the flower in my lap or twisted the stem in my hand, where Noel could enjoy the sight of the bloom and know it was for him.

  Reading in the car while she waited for me outside the prison, my mother would look up, as she heard me return, with her shrewd, anxious, complicit, welcoming expression that awaited me as a little girl when I was released from my first days of school. Had I done well ? Here was my support, my reward, and the guarantor to whom I was contracted for my performance. At home, my father, his hands on my shoulders where I sat at table (his way with me, since I had been very small, to caress me like this as he came home from his patients and stood behind my chair a moment) interrogated about what Noel had managed to convey under the lovey-dovey. Was it true that Jack Schultz had been moved to another section of the prison ? Had the politicals been on hunger strike for two days the previous week ? I always remembered exactly what had been said in the prison visiting-room dialogue between Noel and me, although —as it was to be with my father later—several other prisoners were in their stalls talking to their visitors at the same time, and sentences in many voices crossed back and forth chaotically over his and mine. I remembered word for word, his exact turn of phrase, his cadence —so that, decoding his meanings, glancing from one to another for confirmation of interpretation, my father, mother and I could rely on each nuance being the prisoner’s own. It could also be relied upon that I had found the way to convey to him the messages I was entrusted with.

  When I had got my driving licence and could go to Noel’s prison visit alone, after I had seen him I drove slowly round the limits of the blind red-brick buildings caged in barbed wire with lookouts high up where guns and lights roosted. Round and round, in low gear, as many times as I dared without attracting suspicion. I could see there was no way out. If that was what I was looking for: or for some sign of where, behind those walls whose base not even a weed was allowed to approach, so forbidding and remote yet so ugly, commonplace, he was now back in a cell whose dark, recessed meshed slot might be that one or that one. The effort of following the live impression of him—only just left—into that place, down corridors I had caught sight of, through the smells of lavatory disinfectant, floor polish and sickly stewing meat whose whiff I had got, dazed me. If I looked away from the walls, towards warders’ houses, I used to see children playing in the small gardens, creaking the rusty chains of swings provided for them. It was easier to follow him to another life he might be living, on a farm with me (the farm I knew as a child, with tobacco limp as gloves in the drying shed); he wanted to be a farmer (I collected every scrap of information about him) although he had a science degree and worked for a paint manufacturer before he became a political prisoner.—Why should I choose to go to Tanzania or be rescued by Marcus and his wife in Sweden—why could not Noel de Witt and I have gone away to farm, to breed babies from me that would look like him, to grow wattle or tobacco or mealies or anything it was that he wanted to make flourish and couldn’t, not so much as a knot of tough grass able to force its way between the bricks of those walls ?

  I did—as you say—what was expected. I was not a fake. Once a month I sat as they had sent me to take their messages and receive his, a female presented to him with the smiling mouth, the gazing yet evasive eyes, the breasts drooping a little as she hunched forward, a flower standing for what lies in her lap. We didn’t despise prostitutes in that house—our house—we saw them as victims of necessity while certain social orders lasted.

  When Noel de Witt’s sentence was served the prison authorities did what is often done with political prisoners, they opened the doors early one morning a few days before the stated date of his release, and put him out with the old airways bag of clothes and the watch that had been taken from him when he entered two years before. He knew he would be banned or perhaps house-arrested within a week, and he had, hidden away in town, an Australian passport on which he could leave the country if he were quick enough. He did not dare come to our house. From one of those Portuguese greengrocer’s shops that open when dawn supplies come from the market, he telephoned someone else, someone on the fringe, who could be trusted to do what was expected now as I had before—someone who had kept safe the Australian passport. When he arrived in England Noel sent a letter through another contact to tell my father these things and there was an enclosure for me, sweet and funny, to thank me for the letters that had cheered him, the visits that had kept him going, the goodies I’d been able to wheedle Chief Warder Potgieter into passing, the cleverly-chosen books I’d managed to get by as essential for his studies. A grateful hospital veteran’s phrases. Flowers came without a card and I was told he’d left some of the little money he had, for these to be ordered.

  Those were my love letters. Those visits were my great wild times. All this I was free to understand in the tin cottage.

  I grumbled one day, some commonplace—I’m sick of this job.—

  You were driving me from the hospital where I worked. When we spoke to each other there was the clandestine quality of talking to oneself; the taunting and tempting of mutual culpability. You acknowledged me in you rather than looked towards me.—Even animals have the instinct to run a mile from sickness and death, it’s natural.—

>   The platitude I had used so meaninglessly, harmless remark belonging to the same level of communication as ‘I’ve got a bit of a headache’, broke loose in me. There was no sense of proportion for such things in that cottage; I was taken possession of by chance remarks, images, incidents; the unnumbered pages came up. I read them again and again, their script appeared in everything I seemed to be looking at, pupils of yellow egg yolk slipping separate from whites of eyes cracked against the bowl, faint quarterings of tabby ancestry vestigial on the belly of the black cat, the slow alphabetical dissolve from identity to identity, changing one letter at a time through the spelling of names in the telephone directory. Spoken against the cover of your daily noise on the violin and the bucklings of the tin roof that shifted silences, the chorus of running water in the bath that was furred with putty-coloured lime like an old kettle, the calls of the watchman’s drunks making their trajectory over the sough of night traffic, my silence hammered sullen, hysterical, repetitive without words: sick, sick of the maimed, the endangered, the fugitive, the stoic; sick of courts, sick of prisons, sick of institutions scrubbed bare for the regulation endurance of dread and pain.

  Yet I left the cottage where this kind of fervid private tantrum was possible.

  I left the children’s tree-house we were living in, in an intimacy of self-engrossment without the reserve of adult accountability, accepting each other’s encroachments as the law of the litter, treating each other’s dirt as our own, as little Baasie and I had long ago performed the child’s black mass, tasting on a finger the gall of our own shit and the saline of our own pee. Although you and I huddled for warmth in the same bed, I never minded your making love to the girl who taught Spanish. And you know we had stopped making love together months before I left, aware that it had become incest.