Burger's Daughter
Page 39
A letter came to Madame Bagnelli in France. It bore the stamp of the Prisons Department in Pretoria but this aroused no interest in the handsome postman who stopped in for a pernod when he delivered the mail, because he could not read English and did not know where Pretoria was. In a passage dealing with the comforts of a cell as if describing the features of a tourist hotel that wasn’t quite what the brochure might have suggested—I have rigged up out of fruit boxes a sort of Japanese-style portable desk (remember the one old Ivan Poliakoff had, the one he used when he wrote in bed) and that’s what I’m writing at now—there was a reference to a watermark of light that came into the cell at sundown every evening, reflected from some west-facing surface outside; something Lionel Burger once mentioned. But the line had been deleted by the prison censor. Madame Bagnelli was never able to make it out.
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Told through the eyes of a young man, this is the story of what he knows and what he imagines of political and erotic liberation, of sexual jealousy between father and adolescent son, and of the power of apartheid behind the changes in 1980s South Africa.
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1 Uncle.
2 Literally ‘aunts’; Mother Grundys.