Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  To be free is to become almost a stranger to oneself: the nearest I’ll ever get to seeing what they saw outside the prison. If I could have seen that, I could have seen that other father, the stranger to myself. I seem always to have known of his existence.

  I suppose you found another place to live. (Mexico perhaps.) We didn’t bump into each other around town (you never knew about the man in the park). But you were the one who had said—Why d’you talk about him as ‘Lionel’ ?—

  —Do I?—

  —Sometimes even in the same sentence—‘my father’, and the next moment you switch to ‘Lionel’.—

  It was something curious, to you who were nosy about what you called the mores of a house of ‘committed’ people. In me, significant —of what? It’s true that to me he was also something other than my father. Not just a public persona; many people have that to put on and take off. Not something belonging to the hackneyed formulation of the tracts and manifestos that explain him, for others. His was different. His may have been what he really was. After he was dead—after I left the cottage where I accused him—that persona became something held secret from me. How can I explain that the death of the man—the man in the park was part of the mystery. As he had died, or the fact of his death existed in my presence without my having been aware of it, so I lived in my father’s presence without knowing its meaning.

  There were things whose existence was not admitted, in that house. Just as your mother’s love affairs and the way your father made his money were not, in yours. My parents’ was a different kind of collusion. It surprises me to see, looking at photographs, my mother was actually good-looking. And not only when she was young—in Russia, on some Students for Peace junket, everyone on a railway station holding bouquets big as bundles of washing—but even at that famous nineteenth birthday party of mine that was raided by the police a few months before her illness began. There is supposed to be a particular bountiful attractiveness about a woman who is unaware of her good looks, but if, as with my mother, she literally does not inhabit them, lives in purposes that are not served in any particular way by the distinction of a narrow face with deep eye-sockets, a long, straight, slender prow of nose, a skin so fine that even the earlobes are delicately ornamental under early-greying hair, these beauties fall into disuse through something more than neglect. There’s a photograph that catches her looking up from a table full of papers, dirty tea-cups, ashtrays, among her plain or brassy women garment workers; magnified by reading glasses, her intricately-marked irises are extraordinary, and the lashes are as thick on the lower eyelids as on the upper. Beautiful eyes. But I see only the interrogatory watchfulness that looked out, looked up at my footsteps displacing the gravel outside my ‘fiancé’s’ jail; the quick flicker of early-warning or go-ahead that went out to my father when she and he were in discussion with the many people who used that house. The lipstick she, in the habit of women of her generation, put on her lips, outlined not the shape of the lips so much as the determined complexity that composed them—a mouth that has learnt to give nothing away when speaking; whose smile comes from the confidence not of attraction but of conviction. I suppose children always think of their mothers as being capable; a rationalization of dependence and trust. She always knew what to do, and did it. The crowds of people who came to her funeral loved her for her kindness; the rationale of her always deciding what action to take, and acting. When Tony lay in the swimming-pool that Saturday morning she jumped in (one of her shoes as she kicked them off hit me) and when she came up out of the water she had him. Lily was holding me and screaming, as if the water would take me, too. My mother hooked her fingers in Tony’s mouth and hiked him up with a great effort, she was gasping and coughing, and held him upside-down. The water came out with bits of his breakfast in it, bits of pink bacon I saw. She squatted over him and breathed from her mouth to his, holding his nose shut and releasing the pressure of her hands on his chest. She did this for a long time.

  But he was dead.

  My father—as a doctor—put her to sleep. The next day he took me to her in their bed; I felt afraid to enter the room. She took me into the bed with her and she was crying, not the way Tony and I did, making a noise, but silently, the tears running sideways into her hair. Lily told me they would ‘fill up that terrible hole’—the swimming-pool. Lily said she would never go on that side of the house again, never!

  One Sunday soon after, my father remarked that he hadn’t timed my crawl once since the school term had begun.

  —What about a demonstration this morning ? Lovely hot day—

  I didn’t read the comic supplement spread before me on the floor. My mother ignored the pawing of the cat, wanting to get onto her lap.

  —Put on your costume. Off you go.—When I came back he took his car-key out of his pocket and going over to my mother, opened her hand, put the key in it, and folded the hand, holding the fist he had made of it within his own.—You said you’d take the car and fill up for me.—

  That swimming-pool was enjoyed by many people. It became the tradition, in summer, for us to keep open house round it at Sunday lunch—Lionel Burger’s braaivleis. My mother swam; she kept a supply of blow-up armlets and it was a rule of the house, dutifully followed by new guests, new contacts, who did not know that the Burgers had had a son, that all children in the pool area had to wear them. Some of the black friends had never been in a pool before; the municipal swimming baths weren’t open to them. My father gave their children swimming lessons; they clung to him, like Baasie and me. In that house, we children had few exclusive rights with our parents. Taking into account the important difference that I was a female child and so the sexual implications would have been different, I wonder if the sight of my mother with another man—all right, under another man—would have cracked the shell of containing reality for me, made me recoil entirely into that of internal events, as it did for you ? ‘I wonder’ in the sense that I doubt it; she was Baasie’s mother, as well as Tony’s and mine, and mother to others from time to time, so perhaps I should not have thought of her and my father, Lionel, as each other’s possession. We belonged to other people. I must have accepted that, too, very young, in that house. I became Noel de Witt’s girl, if need be.

  And other people belonged to us. If my mother had no lover—and although I see I know nothing, nothing about her, I am sure of this—there were other relationships, not sexual, about which there has been speculation. Even in court, The woman who couldn’t meet my father’s face, looking so gently, patiently at her—who couldn’t let herself see ‘even the toe of his shoe’: poor sniveller, wretched or despicable, she began as one of my mother’s collection of the dispossessed, like Baasie or the old man who lived with us. Unlike them, she was not what the papers call a victim of apartheid; she was an old-maid schoolteacher who belonged to a church group that looked for uplifting works to do in the black townships. She must have met my mother through the co-operative’s office, in connection with some feeding scheme or other. One of those eager souls who see no contradiction in their protest that they are not at all ‘political’ but would like to do something effective—something less self-defeating than charity, for what (euphemism being their natural means of expression) they call ‘race relations’. Through my mother, she began to teach at the school Baasie and Tony and I had been to, the little school that did not officially exist, where we white, African, coloured and Indian children of my parents’ ‘family’ of associates learned together. So far as she was concerned, my mother had given her exactly what she sought; her gratitude became the kind of worshipping dependency my mother was often burdened with, and we gained another hanger-on in that house. This one was grateful to be in the background: she helped out in my father’s surgery when his receptionist was on leave; she would bring home-grown sweet peppers, carrots and radishes from her little garden, for him, who adored to eat raw, bright vegetables; when my mother was ill she wanted to nurse her, although there were others preferred for
their skill and the abundant life and vigour dying people need as reassurance.

  It is not known when she began making herself useful in other ways. The dates at which the prosecution, for whom she appeared under indemnity as State Witness, suggested she was already acting as a courier predate the illness and death of my mother; but nothing was proved—she wept and insisted she had gone to Scotland for the visit to her elder sister she had been saving for over many years. She produced the inevitable post office book as proof of this monthly scrimping and self-denial, and one needed only to look at her to believe in it.

  Maybe my mother knew she could count on the genteel, schoolgirl code of such a person never to enquire about the contents or addressee of, let alone open, letters she was asked to deliver abroad. It was little enough to ask of someone so eager to be needed ? This quick realization within my mother would be signalled by that sudden seizing glance, sideways, without turning the head, showing the whites of those eyes shaded not only by their dreamy sockets but also the darkening skin round them, as my mother grew older. I know it well, I’ll always know it, that look my mother was unconscious of and that would have amazed—disquieted her: it was a glance that slipped the leash.

  When I was the woman of my father’s house, after my mother’s death, this particular hanger-on scarcely ever came there. Perhaps she knew I had no feelings for her; if anything a young girl’s unthinkingly cruel irritation at her self-effacing lack of definition. We didn’t notice her absence, as we certainly should have that of Bridget Sulzer, Ivy and Dick Terblanche, Aletta Gous, Marisa Kgosana, Mark Liebowitz, Sipho Mokoena—any of those longtime associates of my mother and father who were still at large, neither in jail, in exile, nor opted out, or even the new frequenters who from time to time were attracted into that house. You were one; Conrad, you never told me whether or not Lionel, in his unique way, making you feel you would be liked, honoured, understood whether you responded or not, tried to recruit you. I wonder if perhaps he did, and you were ashamed that you withdrew from that marvellous ambience ? That you never joined Baasie and me in the warmth of that stocky breast ? You who had known only a father who prided himself on being self-made on sharp deals in scrap metal and disowned you as a long-haired loafer unworthy of inheriting money and the hard-working tradition in which it was earned. Lionel Burger probably saw in you the closed circuit of self; for him, such a life must be in need of a conduit towards meaning, which posited: outside self. That’s where the tension that makes it possible to live lay, for him; between self and others; between the present and creation of something called the future. Perhaps he tried to give you the chance. When you saw that wretched creature in the witness box, she could have been you.

  It seems that all the time I thought she’d dropped us, or rather that we had thankfully got rid of her, Lionel was in touch with her. She did the simple things such people are fairly safe for. She kept illegal funds in her bank account. She rented a house where one of the faithful successfully lived underground for several months. It may have been out of some sentiment towards my mother’s memory; it may have been because she fell in love, late and hopelessly, with Lionel Burger, who will have made her feel liked, honoured, understood, whether she agreed or not to do what he asked of her, and who will also have—because all women confirm this—made her feel she was a woman. She is the example, in particular, that white liberals give when they point out how Communists, even my father, used innocent people; one could admire the courage, the daring, the lack of regard for self with which a man like Burger acted according to his convictions about social injustice (which, of course, one shares), even if one certainly didn’t share his Communistic beliefs and the form of action these took, but the way in which he involved others was surely ruthless ? She had never been a member of the Party, or any radical organization. She told the court she ‘tried to live according to Christ’, and added the rider ‘very unsuccessfully’. At that point, as at many during her cross-examination, she wept. Her swollen nose and the torn hangnails that disfigured her hands were distasteful. Those who felt she had been exploited by Lionel Burger expressed their pity and kept unexpressed their disgust at the sight; only he, who had given her her chance, looked and listened without either, ready to meet without reproach the bloodshot eyes that could not look at him whom she had betrayed.

  After Lionel Burger’s death a number of people approached his daughter with a view to writing about him. As the only surviving member of his family, she would have been the principal source of information for any biographer. One she refused after the first meeting. Another’s letters she did not answer. The one to whom she agreed to make material available did not find her very communicative. She had little to offer in the way of documentation ; she said the family kept few letters or papers, and what there was had been taken away in police raids in the course of the years. She mentioned she had part of her parents’ library but turned aside from suggestions that perhaps this in itself might be interesting to a biographer.

  He wanted to go over with her the facts about her father’s life—and that implied, from a certain date, her mother’s life, too—that he had already collated from written sources, including court records, and the history of the Communist Party in South Africa which he had had to research abroad because most works concerning it were banned within the country. She answered questions in a way he found unexpected—was unprepared for. It was not what she said but the physical aspect of their confrontation. They sat at a table in the sun at the house of a friend of hers through whom he had managed to make contact with her. She kept her arms from elbow to hand resting slack on the table-top most of the time. She spoke without looking at him but at the end of what she had to say turned clear pale grey eyes steadily on him. What was expected of him ? He felt inadequate. She at once gave too little and posed something he did not understand.

  Lionel Burger had been born in 1905 on the farm ‘Vergenoegd’ to a wealthy family in the Springbok Flats district of the Northern Transvaal, but had gone to school in Pretoria and Johannesburg.

  Well—she didn’t know if they should be called wealthy—they owned land that they’d lived on for several generations.

  He began his medical studies at Cape Town, and completed them at Edinburgh University in the late 1920s. He married Colette Swan, a South African girl studying ballet in London, while still a student, and returned to South Africa with her in 1930. They had one son, now also a doctor, and practising in Tanzania. They were divorced—when ?

  The daughter of the second marriage didn’t know. The date of her own parents’ marriage was 19th August 1946, the week of the black miners’ great strike on the Witwatersrand. Her mother, Cathy Jansen, was twenty-six and the general secretary of a canning or textile union—anyway, one of the three or four existing mixed unions of coloured and white people at the time. The marriage was supposed to have taken place on 14th August but the best man, J. B. Marks, chairman of the African Mineworkers’ Union, was arrested on the second day of the strike and this seems to have upset the wedding plans for a few days. Another trade unionist, Gana Makabeni, stood in for Marks. By then, both bride and bridegroom had also been arrested, as a result of a raid on the Communist Party offices in Johannesburg on 16th August. Although her name appeared on the charge sheet as Cathy Jansen, she had become Lionel Burger’s second wife while he and she were out on bail, before the preparatory examination opened.

  And that was on 26th August ?—confirmed. Along with more than fifty other people, black, white, Indian and coloured, many of whom were Communists (and of whom only the few names unforgotten, Bram Fischer, Dr Dadoo, Moses Kotane, would get a mention in the biography) the couple were charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act with having aided an illegal strike and also with having offended against something called War Measure 145. The biographer offered the information that he had looked up War Measure 145: it outlawed strikes by Africans and exposed black strikers to a minimum penalty of £300 or three years. The trial was the most r
epresentative, in the country’s history, of the different ideologies, skin colours, class interests in opposition to the white regime; it was the first in which her mother and father were indicted together. It was also, in its scope, a shadow cast before the Treason Trial, coming in 1957; the only other, and last trial in which the Burger couple would stand accused together. The trial of her parents before she was born—like the one that was to take place when she would be a child old enough to retain impressions, surely, that could be remembered and recounted ?—both ended without Lionel Burger or his wife being convicted.

  But two months after they were married, following a new wave of raids on the homes of radicals in all the large towns, Lionel Burger was re-arrested. He and his fellow members of the Central Executive of the Communist Party in Cape Town were charged with sedition as a result of that miners’ strike which had postponed but failed to disrupt his marriage plans.

  With this observation the biographer provoked a slow wide smile from the daughter of the marriage. For a few moments the list of raids, arrests and trials was the family album: the couple had only just dumped their belongings in their Johannesburg flat when the raid came; there was Lionel Burger’s often-heard story of how the police, instructed to search the contents of cupboards and drawers, found these empty, and had to do the unpacking of the suitcases and crates of books instead. He and his new bride simply hung up cups and arranged plates and pots and pans as the police squatted among newspaper and straw, doing the dirty work.

  An additional charge against the accused was to do with the Official Secrets Act; again the biographer had consulted the Statute Books, and the supposed breach was a legal technicality relating to a ‘Hands off Java’ campaign, with a call for boycott of ships passing by way of South African ports while carrying cargo across the Indian Ocean to troops in Indonesia after the Japanese occupation had been ended. But both the biographer and Rosa Burger were too young for campaigns of the immediate aftermath of the Second World War to have much meaning for them.