Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  —It was a contact visit ?—I fall back easily into the jargon of prison visiting. It will always come to me, the language I learnt as a child. At the caprice of the chief warder I would see my father in a small bare room (the furnishings the basic unit for interrogation, two upright chairs and a table, with which the purpose of such rooms was always present) or on the other side of the wire grille through which I could not touch my fiancé’s hand.

  —He asked about you, he sends his love.—The symmetry of her lovely face smiling made the lie a gift. I hadn’t seen her and had sent no word to him through her for so long it was unlikely my name would have come up between them. Experienced people don’t waste the precious time of visits; everything to be said by both is thought out and fitted into the allotted period in advance. But there was I, asking about all the others by name, Mandela, Sisulu, Kathrada, Mbeki, the black men with whom my father worked in an intimacy whose nature no one outside it, standing in the street watching arrests of people who haven’t snatched pay-rolls or pushed drugs, can understand. Marisa repeated the prisoners’ jokes, related what they were studying, whether they’d lost weight or ‘put on’ as she phrased it, digressed into gossip about the achievements or problems of their families—while checking her purchases, hesitating whether she shouldn’t add this or that item, and counting out money from the maw of a big fashionable bag with long fingers grappling at the points of the bright nails, like the legs of some exotic insect feeling out prey.—No, I don’t want a parcel—let me have a plastic carrier—one of those over there will do—yes, that’s right—As the woman behind the counter turned away to get change:—When you’re in a hurry it’s best to pay cash... If a black produces a cheque book... I only use mine when I’m prepared to hang about while they excuse themselves and take it to a-1-1 their managers.—And in the same brisk, absent undertone, she made a suggestion, her eyes restless on the saleswoman, her head drawn back to her neck with impatient grace.—My child’s gone to get some school-books, I must pick her up. And someone’s waiting for me—what’s the time, anyway—I said we’d meet at twelve—too bad, can’t be helped... What are you doing today—this afternoon or this evening ?—Marisa did not remember what day this was although she had a few moments before talked of Lionel (as Lionel used to say to Joe, if you can keep your weight and blood-pressure low, man, nothing can get you down).—Come out? You remember my cousin’s place, Fats ?—

  —You turn past Orlando High.—

  —Yes, carry straight on, then when you come to the dip, third road on the right—

  —There’s a shop that sells coal, on the corner... ?—

  —That’s right, Vusili’s store—

  Between us, while the murmured exchange went back and forth like any other insincere enthusiasm between friends who bump into one another, was the unspoken question-and-answer that our kind follow by gaps in what is said and hesitations or immediacy of response. Marisa is banned and under house arrest. I am Named. The law forbids us to meet or speak, let alone embrace; we take what chances come, of meetings like this, in passing, on neutral and anonymous ground. You taunted me with being inhibited; but you never had anything you valued enough, that was threatened enough for you to hide. Secrecy is a discipline it’s hard for old hands to unlearn. People under house arrest cannot receive friends at home or go out at night or weekends; if Marisa could come to town on a Saturday she must have been using a ‘spare’ day of the exemption granted her for the visit to the Island. She was taking a chance—another—on getting away with going out to someone’s house at night. She was unsure whether or not I was banned from gatherings in addition to being named. In fact I was under no ban although I have been refused a passport since before I was named—the very first year I applied. And that application was a secret, too; this time my own, not assumed in common with the others of that house, unspoken between my father and mother and me. She and Lionel did not ever know I tried for a passport when I was eighteen in preparation to follow Noel de Witt to Europe when he came out of jail. He had never known, either; but—de Witt’s fiancee and Lionel Burger’s daughter—the Minister refused me. In any case, whites are not allowed to go into black townships without a permit, and the presence of the only living member of the Burger family would not be let pass if discovered; if Marisa ignored that she was running a risk, so, if I followed the directions we were exchanging harmlessly, at risk, should I be ignoring my own.

  She squeezed my hand and moved away at the same time, our hands remaining linked until they dropped apart, as blacks will do parting on street corners, calling over their shoulders as they finally go separate ways. But she forgot me instantly. In the swaying, forward movement of her crested head as she disappeared and reappeared through the shoppers there was only consciousness of the admiration she exacted, with her extravagant dress, the Ruritanian pan-Africa of triumphant splendour and royal beauty that is subject to no known boundaries of old custom or new warring political ideologies in black countries, and to no laws that make blacks’ lives mean and degrading in this one. If the white people in the shop saw only errand boys and tea-girls and street sweepers instead of black people, now they saw Marisa. The saleswoman spoke to me with the smile of one white woman to another, both admiring a foreign visitor.—Where’s she from ? One of those French islands ?—

  Seychelles or Mauritius; it was what she understood by the Island. I told her:—From Soweto.——Fancy!—she was ready to learn something, her new-moon eyebrows above the golden frame of her glasses.

  You were particularly curious about Baasie. You taxed me with him :—That’s how you are: here’s something that will be important for you for the rest of your life, whether you know it or not. You say you don’t ‘think’ about that kid. Whether you ‘think’ about it or don’t... When you were five years old you were afraid of the dark together. You crept into one bed.—

  I didn’t answer, I kept my head turned from you because I was thinking that that was what I did with you, that was what I was. I was remembering a special, spreading warmth when Baasie had wet the bed in our sleep. In the morning the sheets were cold and smelly, I told tales to my mother—Look what Baasie’s done in his bed!—but in the night I didn’t know whether this warmth that took us back into the enveloping fluids of a host body came from him or me. You wanted to know what had happened to him. Again and again, in the cottage, you would try to trap me into answering indirectly, unwittingly, although I had told you I didn’t know. I didn’t tell you what I did know. His father, Isaac Vulindlela, was working with Lionel until the day Lionel was arrested for the last time. He was one of those who left the country and returned under false papers. He managed it successfully twice, helped by his Tswana wife’s family on the border of Botswana, who (like Auntie Velma and Uncle Coen ?) didn’t want to know what he was doing. The third time, when my father was already in prison, I was the one who delivered the new passbook to the dorp ten or twenty miles from the border. It was one of the weekends when I disappeared—to show a Scandinavian journalist the scenes of Lionel’s boyhood; or to sleep with my Swedish lover entered in a motel register as his wife. The third purpose of the trip was not known to the Swede; I suppose it would give him still greater cachet if he were to learn about it, even now. A better present than a beaded belt or a black migrant mineworker’s wristband. My Swede and I were travelling not in my car but the visitor’s hired one, as the normal precaution of anonymity he is no doubt used to in his love affairs in the course of assignments that take him from country to country; I told him the spare tyre was soft and I had better see to it as he couldn’t speak Afrikaans and at a dorp garage English wouldn’t be much use. He stayed in bed, in a room hardly different from those where I followed Selena and Elsie as they cleaned up after the commercial travellers, stroking through the cross of blond hair on his chest and writing an article for Dagens Nyheter about the complicity of international industrialists with the apartheid economy.

  At the garage on a Sunday morning there was o
nly one attendant; a plump young black whose overalls had no buttons and were clasped together where absolutely necessary by a big safety-pin at the fly. Striped socks and a peaked cap advertising one of the companies my Swede was arraigning from the twin bed under a print of the Arc de Triomphe in spring: the young black man was mending a punctured tube, sitting on oil-stained tarmac with his legs spreadeagled round a tin bath of water. The sleek seal of black rubber bobbed at his hands. For whoever might be passing, I came over, any white missus.—Are you Abraham ?—It was the year of the Smile button; he wore a big one he had perhaps picked up forgotten by some car full of children piling out to get cokes from the automatic vendor. But he didn’t smile.—Yes, I’m Abraham.—We spoke in Afrikaans and in the usual tones, mine kindly but authoritative, his hesitant and unsure whether he was to expect demand, rebuke or a request he would be reluctant to stir for.—Your mother does my washing. She’s sent you a letter.——Hey ? Wat het die missus gesê ?—He had heard all right but he wanted to make sure the words were exactly what he had been told to expect. I repeated them and he lip-read as if my voice might deceive but my mouth could be trusted. He wiped a wet hand down the overalls and with that movement my own right hand took the thick envelope out of the straw bag I carried to hold the paraphernalia of a car trip. The envelope passed to him and under the folds of the too-large and filthy overalls, the garb of an anonymously imposed and carelessly assumed identity beneath which, like his hidden body, he kept another, his own. He got up and tramped ahead of me to unhook the hose of the bowser and fill up the car. I gave the usual ten cents in addition to the cost of the petrol and he gave the usual flourish of a dirty rag over the windscreen.

  That’s how it’s done. The cloak-and-dagger stuff. You always wanted to know about such things. But how was I to know, am I to know that you were not there for me to come to out of a calculation of my need ? If Lionel Burger didn’t recruit you, it could have been that the other side did. You could have been allotted to me and me to you by the men of the Special Branch who have watched me grow up, as the saying goes for any of those adults whom the Nels had us children give the title of honorary ‘Oom’.

  Whatever else I stood stripped of, teeth chattering in dreadful triumph, in the nights of the cottage, I kept what is second nature become first. I could not shed the instinct for survival that kept my mouth shut to you on such subjects. Unlike the unknown Abraham, you didn’t have the background to lip-read me. And in the dorp that Sunday I went back to the hotel and carried a beer, glass down over the bottle smoking cold at the neck, to my Swede. I didn’t tell him, either. He cajoled me back to bed and typewritten pages floated away to the floor all round us. The hotel’s Selena or Elsie knocked on the door and went away again; hotel servants understand never to ask questions. That’s how it’s done. He made love to me with the dragon Hoover breathing in the corridor outside and he does not know that the essence on his tongue in the bitter wax of my ear chamber, the brines of mouth or vagina were not my secret. For me to be free is never to be free of the survival cunning of concealment. I did not tell you what I know, however much I wanted to. Isaac Vulindlela was caught with one of those passbooks. That’s how it’s done. My father’s biographer, respectfully coaxing me onto the stepping-stones of the official vocabulary—words, nothing but dead words, abstractions: that’s not where reality is, you flung at me—national democratic revolution, ideological integration, revolutionary imperative, minority domination, liberation alliance, unity of the people, infiltration, incursion, viable agency for change, reformist option, armed tactics, mass political mobilization of the people in a combination of legal, semi-legal and clandestine methods—those footholds have come back to my vocabulary lately through parrying him. I don’t know where Baasie is but his father was found dead in a cell after eight months in detention. The police said he hanged himself with his trousers. I managed to convey the news to my father, in prison. Don’t ask me how. He didn’t know, I couldn’t tell him the passbook was one of those I had been able to hand over so easily no one would believe that is how it is done. I find it very hard to tell the difference between the truth and the facts: to know what the facts are? If Abraham at the garage had been a trap the circumstances of my failed mission would have read as ridiculously as any I exposed before poor Clare Terblanche. What was the reality of that weekend in the Western Transvaal dorp ? An act in the third category of methods (legal, semi-legal and clandestine) to co-ordinate political struggle and armed activity in creating an all-round climate of collapse in which a direct political solution becomes possible ? The material transcendence of a man’s span by the recording, for posterity, on film, of landscapes and types of environment that formed his consciousness ? The ecstatic energy consumed in the hotel bed between eleven o’clock in the morning when the Dutch Reformed church bells were tolling and midday when the xylophone notes of the lunch gong were sounded, an hour without any consequences whatever except a stain on the bottom sheet—stiff commemorative plaque that a Selena or Elsie would remark, without having her life altered in any manner, before it disappeared in the wash ?

  Perhaps the way the people in the department store saw me is right. Although it was an article of faith in that house that it is necessary to go beyond the oversimplified race equation—the reformist view of the struggle as between colours, not classes—my mother and father succeeded only in making me a kaffir-boetie. Baasie’s little sibling. Marisa came over me as a sudden good mood. A tenderness softened and livened all round me as I drove home from the city: the Indian vendors with their roses wired like candelabras, and dyed arum lilies; when a red light held me up, the business-like black kid darting, spitting his shrill whistle between the lanes of cars to sell the early edition of the afternoon paper; the huge woman with a full shopping-bag on her head, a tripping child towed at her skirt and that African obi made up of the inevitable baby-on-back and swathed blanket thick round her middle, who launched herself, paused—smiled back at me—and scuttled across my path when she should have been waiting at the crossing. The comfort of black. The persistence, resurgence, daily continuity that is the mass of them. If one is not afraid, how can one not be attracted ? It is one thing or the other. Marisa and Joe Kgosana have all this to draw on. Lionel and Ivy and Dick, my mother and Aletta; behind our kind, who are confined to the magisterial areas of the white suburbs, are people who sent obscene letters calling my father a monster.

  I suppose I intended to go into the township to stay in Marisa’s orbit a while longer, as people take a second drink to prolong the pleasant effect of the first before it wears off. I don’t know; I hadn’t decided. The man who is going to write about Lionel was with me in the flat early that afternoon when someone else arrived. Even surprise is something I can’t help concealing. I didn’t introduce him to the biographer. Orde Greer is a press photographer who knew me by sight, as you did, and whom I knew as I knew you before we had coffee in Pretoria that day, all during the time of Lionel’s trial, one of a cast of faces in which I read who I was. In the past few years I’ve once or twice seen him at a party, fondling an unwilling girl in the indiscriminate way of a man who will not remember next day. He was at the memorial service for Lionel. His name’s familiar, as a by-line in the paper; his person was identified for me by a polio limp as mine was for him by my relationship to my father. He greets me in the street and I nod back.

  A man wearing veldskoen ankle-boots, rolled-down red socks, shorts and in spite of the summer heat a dusty black, fisherman’s sweater—if I hadn’t recognized him at once as the one who was handicapped he might have been some athlete jogging round the neighbourhood in training.

  —I believe I’m supposed to pick you up. For Fats’ place—And because the biographer was there behind me, I answered as if such an arrangement had been made.—I’ll only be another few minutes. Come in.—Marisa’s name was not mentioned before a third person; already this established an area where Orde Greer and I knew one another better than by sight. My father
’s biographer was looking round at him with the frustration, concealed under an affectation of good manners, of one who finds he cannot place someone whose significance he is sure he ought to know. He shuffled notes together and made as if to leave; I apologized firmly for terminating the session, but he was the one who was all apologies. He left; I didn’t mention to Orde Greer who he was or what he was doing, either.

  I didn’t know whether Greer was one of us or not; perhaps he was. His bona fides was that Marisa had sent him. I offered him a drink if he would give me time to tidy up a bit before we went.

  —That’s okay. I’m early...what’s going?—

  Sitting in my chair (the old green leather one, the colour of holly leaves, that was in my father’s study and that we children used to like to slide on because the friction of bare thighs produced static electricity) he had the air of taking a place he had a right to, would assume with a slightly nervous aggression before challenge. His outfit now suggested ease in the company for which he was bound.

  But newspapermen have to be like that—they are used to assuming entry, I know. Afraid of me, and yet familiar at the same time; I had plenty of experience of it during the trial. There was only beer; he paused in mark of regret for the bottle of whisky he had hoped to settle down with:—Beer it is.—Thick hair that tangled with a beard and gave him a consciously noble head, from the front, left him vulnerable when he bent to retrieve the metal loop fallen from the can, showing the hair already rubbed away into the scalp like a baby’s tonsured by the pillow on which it lies helpless.