Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  I have lost connection. It’s only the memory of childhood warmth for me. Marisa says we must ‘stick together’. The Terblanches offer me the chance to steal the key of the photocopying room. What is to be done? Lionel and my mother did not stand before Duma Dhladhla and have him say: I don’t think about that.

  They had the connection because they believed it possible.

  Rosa Burger did not go back until more than a year after his death to the town where her father had been tried, imprisoned, and died. These occasions for her to visit the town gave rise to no others; he has no grave. But when that summer had already been bisected by the change of the year from old to new in the final digit of the Barry Eckhard organization’s desk-calendars, she drove three times to the town and three different addresses there, during February-March. After a period of some weeks, she again began to pay a number of visits (on the 13th and 30th April and on the 7th and 24th May); but these were all to the same address. She was known to have driven to town on these dates and to these destinations by the surveillance to whom all her movements had been and were known, from the day a fourteen-year-old girl, the arteries of her groin painfully charged with menstrual blood, stood with a hot-water bottle and an eiderdown outside the prison. Whether certain purposes those movements concealed—the slip of paper with the child’s message to her mother hidden round the screw-top of the hot-water bottle—were always discoverable to surveillance cannot be sure, although for reasons of counter-strategy it is accepted that people like Lionel Burger don’t hesitate to make their children adept at feints and lies from the time they’re set on their feet. The new occasion for her visits to the town was soon placed: in a category indicated by what the disparate identities of the people she visited had in common. All were people whose allegiance made her father their enemy. All were Afrikaners, whose history, blood and language made him their brother.

  Burger’s daughter wanted something, then. Something not available to her own kind. She was officially ‘named’ her kind, high up on the list, not only alphabetically. Although she was not banned, her naming as a Communist was restrictive of associations and movements she would most desire. Perhaps it was a favour she wanted for someone connected with her; but since the affair with the hippy against whom nothing could be found, and the dirty weekends with the Scandinavian journalist (the Department of the Interior had been instructed that he should never be granted another visa, the post office had been instructed to open all letters addressed to him) she seemed to be keeping to herself, except for the old contacts long taken for granted between such people, old lines surveillance can always find its way swiftly along, woken at the epicentre by the tremble of a victim newly trapped. Perhaps she wanted some relaxation of her restrictions; was tired of being a typist and had taken up again the idea of going to work with those two British doctors in the Transkei. Whatever it was, she wanted it badly enough to seek out prominent Nationalists on whom she must carefully have calculated a lien that might lever against the stone slab of fear and resistance her approach would cause to drop into position before them.

  It was only when, in April and May, she began to return to one of the three addresses that the exact nature of what she was after began to be narrowed down. The address upon which she had settled her intention, either because she had been rebuffed at the others, or because she had eliminated all but the most useful, was that of Brandt Vermeulen. Brandt Vermeulen is one of the ‘New Afrikaners’ from an old distinguished Afrikaner family. In each country families become distinguished for different reasons. Where there is no Almanach de Gotha, the building of railroads and sinking of oil wells becomes a pedigree, where no one can trace himself back to Argenteuil or the Crusades, colonial wars substitute for a college of heraldry. Brandt Vermeulen’s great-great-grandfather was murdered by Dingaan with Piet Retief’s party, his maternal grandfather was a Boer War general, there was a poet uncle whose seventieth birthday has been commemorated by the issue of a stamp, and another uncle interned during the Second World War, along with Mr Vorster, for pro-Nazi sympathies, there is even a cousin who was decorated posthumously for bravery in battle against Rommel at Alamein. Cornelius Vermeulen, a Moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church, was a Minister in the first National Party government after the triumph of the Afrikaner in 1948, when his son Brandt was eight years old, and held office in the successive Strydom, Verwoerd and Vorster governments before retiring to one of the family farms in the Bethal district of the Transvaal.

  The sons of distinguished families also often move away from the traditional milieu and activities in discordance with whatever their particular level in frontier society has confined them to. Just as the successful Jewish or Indian country storekeeper’s son becomes a doctor or lawyer in the city, or the son of the shift-boss on the goldmine goes into business, Brandt Vermeulen left farm, church and party caucus and went to Leyden and Princeton to read politics, philosophy and economics, and to Paris and New York to see modern art. He did not come back, Europeanized, Americanized by foreign ideas of equality and liberty, to destroy what the great-great-grandfather died for at the hands of a kaffir and the Boer general fought the English for; he came back with a vocabulary and sophistry to transform the home-whittled destiny of white to rule over black in terms that the generation of late-twentieth-century orientated, Nationalist intellectuals would advance as the first true social evolution of the century, since nineteenth-century European liberalism showed itself spent in the failure of racial integration wherever this was tried, and Communism, accusing the Afrikaner of enslaving blacks under franchise of God’s will, itself enslaved whites and yellows along with blacks in denial of God’s existence. He and his kind were the first to be sophisticated enough to laugh at the sort of thing only denigrators of the Afrikaner volk were supposed to laugh at: the Dutch Reformed Churches’ denouncement of the wickedness of Sunday sport or cinema performances, the censorship board’s ruling that white breasts on a magazine cover were pornography while black ones were ethnic art. He did not shrink from open contact with blacks as his father’s generation did, and he regarded the Immorality Act as the relic of an antiquated libidinous backyard guilt about sex that ought to be scrapped, since in the new society of separate nations each flying the flag of its own skin, the misplacement of the white man’s semen in a black vagina would emerge, transformed out of all recognition of source, as the birth of yet another nation. He was a director of one of the first insurance companies that had broken into the Anglo-Saxon and Jewish domination of finance when he was a schoolboy, but his avocation was a small art publishing firm he indulged himself with at the sacrifice of losing in it his share of the profits of a wine farm inheritance from his mother’s family. At symposia, where he was the invariable choice of white liberals to contribute views fascinatingly awful to them, he was animated on the platform in the company of black delegates, and widely quoted in press reports. I don’t see you through spectacles of fear and guilt...my perceptions, like those of my fellow Afrikaner nationalists, are of positive and fruitful interaction between nation and nation, and not of racial rivalry. This will exclude political power-sharing within a single country. Frankly, Afrikaners will not accept that... I foresee a future in which the different nations could reach a peaceful co-existence through hard bargaining...

  An English-language newspaper expose once named him a member of the Afrikaner political Mafia whose brethren rule the country from within parliament; and he was interviewed dealing with that, too, smilingly. Why only the Broederbond? Why not the Ku-Klux-Klan or the League of Empire Loyalists? So it was not revealed how high his influence in high places might go. He had close friendships in several ministries. An elegant photographic essay, very different from the usual sort of Come-to-sunny-South-Africa information publication, appeared under his imprint in all the country’s embassies; there were people in the Department of Information who found ‘dynamic’ his ideas about improving the country’s image without either deviating from principles or being s
o naive as to lie about them.

  But his closest friendship was placed within the Ministry of the Interior. The ministry where passports are granted; so that was it. It was hardly credible to surveillance that Burger’s daughter could expect she might ever get one of those; what was of more interest was what should be making her try. During the April period of her visits to the friend of the departments of Information and the Interior, the Portuguese regime was overthrown in Lisbon, and the lever that had finally dislodged that came from the mutiny of Portuguese troops refusing to fight Frelimo in their final colonial war: it was possible she had lain low on instructions ever since her father’s imprisonment waiting to serve just such a situation as this—presenting herself ‘clean’, she wanted to get out of the country because it was necessary to set up new lines of increased contact to take full advantage of the bases Samora Machel would offer for infiltration from a Marxist Moçambique now established just over the border South Africans unlike her, with passports, used to cross to eat prawns and go spear-fishing. Certainly it was known her kind had had connections with Frelimo all along (that was why the Terblanche woman and her daughter were picked up and put in detention the first week of May, the old man left out to see who would come to him). The solidarity-with-Frelimo ‘Freedom’ meeting of thousands of blacks, Africans and Indians at Currie’s Fountain in Durban brought this connection into the open; interrogation of people arrested there could be relied upon to provide new leads, and no doubt these would double back to the old sources. There was her half-brother in Tanzania; he was surveyed there, too; some of those secretly recruited for military training as Freedom Fighters already have been recruited and receive their little stipend wherever they are. The fact that there was no information she had contact with the brother beyond the two letters after the father died, that indeed it was known he did not have her address after she moved to a flat in the city, did not mean he was not prepared, through a third person, for contact with her wherever she might go abroad, or a welcome for her under another identity in Dar es Salaam. Her father’s daughter; she might try anything, that one. But activity within the country suggested by the fact that she should attempt to pass out and in again was what was of concern; there was no hope at all for her that she would get what she had never had, what had been refused her once and for all when she tried to run away from her mother and father after the boy she wanted.

  The freeway had been completed since she drove there last; sections, including that which had bulldozed the corrugated-iron cottage and incorporated old loquat trees into landscaping, were linked and distance shortened. The loops hovered at a. smooth remove from the milky-coffee river that became a stony ditch in winter, and drowned animals in summer; past country estates where horse-jumps were laid out; cut tracks where an old black man was hauling what was left of a car chassis to a community of Ndebele houses like a mud fort on a horizon of deep veld grasses. Rosa Burger was able to see all these seasons and incidents from then and now; on those other journeys there was room in her for nothing between a point of departure and arrival. The road set her gliding down towards the town between hills softly brilliant with the green of thorn scrub. The monumental shrine to the myth of the volk, shape of a giant’s musical-box away on the left somewhere; a signpost for the pleasure grounds of the wild kloof on the right. And then in past the official’s house in the fine old garden, the trunk of the huge palm-tree holding up its nave of shade, the warders’ houses in sunny domestic order, the ox-blood brick prison with the blind façade on the street—the narrow apertures darkened with bars and heavy diamond-mesh wire, impossible to decide, ever, which corresponded with which category of room for which purpose, and along which corridor in there, to left or right, there was waiting a particular setting of table and two chairs; the police car and van parked outside, a warder come off duty flirting with a girl with yolk-coloured hair and a fox terrier in her arms; the door; the huge worn door with its missing studs and grooves exactly placed for ever. The door was soon passed, and the military headquarters that came next, set back in a gravelled garden with another great palm-tree from the era of the old Republic like the building beside it, a charming example (her father, who had been to Holland, had told her) of Boer colonial adaptation of the seventeenth-century town mansions along the Heerengracht in Amsterdam, built of doll’s house bricks and picked out in white along the bungled proportion of gables too small for its height. The suburban post office, where prisoners’ visitors and warders made up the queues... the Potgieter Street franking enough to convey on an envelope the impress of prison itself.

  Rosa Burger went on through the commercial centre of the town in rush-hour traffic of four in the afternoon, glancing at a piece of paper which did not direct her past the Supreme Court or the old synagogue converted for use as a court to which she knew her way. Driving at the pace of one who must make out signs ahead, she found the suburb and street. One of the old suburbs; Straat Loop Dood, a cul-de-sac tunnelled to the barrier of a steep koppie under enormous jacarandas which were not in flower at that season. The houses were those of Boers become burgers seventy or eighty years ago; single-storey farmhouses with dark stoeps where the old people who built them will have sat until they died. The house was like all the others; a pair of horns above the front door, a woody orange tree bearing tiny senile fruit, a wooden balustrade to the red-polished stoep, an oil-drum of Elephant Ear and another from which a flowering cactus clawed up the wall and clung overhead on tentacles like flies’ feet. A wasp had plastered a nest against the door. The façade was a statement related to those with which Brandt Vermeulen liked good-humouredly to surprise, to confound disdain in symposia—no, I do not live in accordance with my newspaper image of the worldly man-about-town Afrikaner divorce, in a penthouse with a sauna and squash in the basement, apeing the parvenu luxury of Johannesburg. He had the confidence to assert (what he would have termed) an indigenous sensibility; appreciation of the privacy, peace and appropriately simple ‘environmental solution’ preserved in that lovely street, with, of course, another surprise in store—when he opened the humble front door himself, a little tousled, expecting Rosa Burger by telephone appointment but informal by nature, a smiling sun-roused face, he led the way into a huge room that descended on two levels to a glass wall slid back on another garden, a real garden this time. The inside of the house had been knocked apart; it was hollowed out for the space taken up by modern good living. He was barefoot and in white canvas jeans and a checked shirt that smelled of fresh ironing, his hair was wet because—he waved towards the walled garden—he had just had a quick swim. Such a boiling afternoon—would she perhaps like to cool off, his pool was about the size of a bird-bath, no Olympic lengths offered, but there were several bikinis forgotten by various female guests, she was welcome... ? He chattered in English and appeared to have no curiosity at all about her visit. Should they sit outside under the vine, or in? White wooden chaises-longues on wheels were splattered with purple droppings from the Cape thrushes who were feeding their young on the dangling bunches of grapes.—Ah, the mess...but the grapes only look pretty, they’re those sour little Catawba things, and don’t you love the calls of the thrushes? So gentle and inquisitive. And have you seen the size of the babies they’re feeding—great fat lumps with spotted breasts, still, but as big as the poor mamma. They just fly in and sit there with their beaks open, look—she sort of posts grapes down them as if they were letter boxes—The birds skimmed between him and his guest where they stood.—But it’s hot. Cooler inside; come, let’s sit here.—

  The grouping of furniture casually divided the indoor space into comfortable intimacy. Rosa Burger, who had never been in any habitation of this man’s before, was settled in the sling of one of the suede and chrome chairs beside a low glass table where he had been working—under a bowl of yellow roses pushed aside, typescript and proofs of book jacket designs lay among newspapers with columns ringed in red. The flat monk’s sandals she was wearing let in the long white pelt
of a carpet with the feel of soft grass.