It was like an illness no one mentioned, among my father’s relatives with whom we stayed when we were little. An illness that proved fatal: they came to pay their respects when they sat, my aunt and uncle, the good and kind Coen Nels, beside me to hear the life sentence pronounced.
Tony was so happy helping to cook bricks in a serious mud-pie game with the farm labourers who called him ‘little master’ (although that was Baasie’s name) and playing with half-naked black children who were left behind when he and cousin Kobus ran into the farmhouse for milk and cake. I understood quite quickly that Baasie, with whom I lived in that house, couldn’t have come here; I understood what Lily meant when she had said he wouldn’t like to. I forgot Baasie. It was easy. No one here had a friend, brother, bed-mate, sharer of mother and father like him. Those who owed love and care to each other could be identified by a simple rule of family resemblance, from the elders enfeebled by vast flesh or wasting to the infant lying creased in the newly-married couple’s pram. I saw it every Saturday, this human family defined by white skin. In the church to which my aunt drove us on Sunday morning, children clean and pretty, we sat among the white neighbours from farms round about and from the dorp, to whom the predikant said we must do as we would be done by. The waiter my uncle’s barman beat with his lion’s head belt was not there; he would be in his place down under the trees out of sight of the farmhouses, where black people sang hymns and beat old oildrums, or in the tin church in the dorp location. Harry Schutte didn’t come to church (on Saturday nights roars of song and the sound of smashing glasses came from the bar, as farmers’ rugby teams ended their afternoon’s sport) but he had worked hard for his sleep-in and he never forgot an ice-cream for a kid who might have been one of his own (after all, he and my father were born in the same district). Daniel knew the strength of the tattooed arm he was safe from so long as he didn’t take the white man’s bottle but stayed content to swallow the dregs left in his glass.
For the man who had married my father’s sister the farm ‘Vergenoegd’ was God’s bounty that was hers by inheritance, mortgage, land bank loan, and the fruitfulness he made of it, the hotel was his by the sign painted over the entrance naming him as licensee, the bottle store was his by the extension of that licence to off-sales. His sons would inherit by equally unquestioned right; the little boy who played with Tony would make flourish the tobacco, the pyrethrum—whatever the world thinks it needs and will pay for—Noel de Witt would never allow himself to grow.
When the girl cousin who was my contemporary was home from boarding-school for the weekend, we ladyshipped it about hotel and farm together as her natural assumption. Daniel was commanded to bring cokes; the hotel cook was pestered to put dough men in the oven; a farm labourer mended her bicycle, a child from the kraal brought ants’ eggs for her schoolfriend’s grass snake, a kitchen maid had to wash and iron the particular dress she decided to wear. Her mother had no other claim, no other obligation but to please her daughter.
With this cousin I shared the second half of my name; it was the name of our common grandmother, long dead. Marie showed me our grandmother’s grave, fenced in with several others of the family, on the farm. MARIE BURGER was cut into a mirror of smooth grey stone veined with glitter. On the slab were round glass domes cloudy with condensation under which plastic roses had faded.
You thought I must be named for Rosa Luxemburg, and the name I have always been known by as well as the disguised first half of my given name does seem to signify my parents’ desire if not open intention. They never told me of it. My father often quoted that other Rosa; although he had no choice but to act the Leninist role of the dominant professional revolutionary, he believed that her faith in elemental mass movement was the ideal approach in a country where the mass of people were black and the revolutionary elite disproportionately white. But my double given name contained also the claim of MARIE BURGER and her descendants to that order of life, secure in the sanctions of family, church, law—and all these contained in the ultimate sanction of colour, that was maintained without question on the domain, dorp and farm, where she lay. Peace. Land. Bread. They had these for themselves.
Even animals have the instinct to turn from suffering. The sense to run away. Perhaps it was an illness not to be able to live one’s life the way they did (if not the way you did, Conrad) with justice defined in terms of respect for property, innocence defended in their children’s privileges, love in their procreation, and care only for each other. A sickness not to be able to ignore that condition of a healthy, ordinary life: other people’s suffering.
Rosa Burger was among city people who ate in a public square at lunchtime. The stale chill of the airconditioned offices she had left evaporated in the sun and the warm sounds of pigeons. There was a statue. The hissing spigots of a fountain donated by a mining company smoothed traffic blare and voices; she had her sandwiches and fruit, bought boxed under a tight membrane of plastic from a shop on the way, others shared a lovers’ picnic unwrapped from a briefcase between them on a park bench. Children and greedy waddling birds were fed the same sort of titbits. Indian girls secretively ate daintily with their fingers from take-away cartons of curry. On the grass coloured girls jeered, gossiped and laughed, waving chicken-bones, and black men sat with their half-loaves of bread in wisps of wrapping, pulling out the white centre like cotton bolls. There were bins with advertising legends (Why be Lonely? Step Out Tonight with One of Our Lovely Hostesses) where leavings were thrust, and these were picked over, as the pigeons did what was left on gravel and grass, by various people in various kinds of need. The child who led the blind beggar felt for potato chips and half-gnawed chicken, other blacks shook empty cigarette packs, and there were white men and women, threadbare-neat pensioners and old creatures with sparse orange hair and red lips inexpertly drawn in the light of failing sight who might be obsolescent prostitutes, scratching and peering for finds which seemed to give them satisfaction. The women hid these away in tattered shopping bags; the men smoothed retrieved newspapers.
On the grass black men slept deeply, face down; they might have been dead. On benches avoided by other people, white tramps with drunkard’s blue eyes and the brief midday dapperness of hair slicked back in the municipal washroom, approached each other confidentially, came and went with the dogged, shambling dedication of their single purpose—to find money for a bottle. Sometimes one of these who were fixtures along with the pigeons was apart from the others, drunk, asleep, or in some inertia and immobility that was neither. Rosa, seeing one like this, chose a bench on the other side of the walk. But she need not have thought he might make a nuisance of himself; she ate her lunch, two little boys ran up and down twirling plastic whirligigs before him, a girl wearing the name DARLENE in gilt letters suspended on either side by a gilt chain round a freckled neck kissed a young man for the full time it took a pantechnicon, unable to turn at the traffic lights because of a parked car, to manoeuvre its length back into the street from which it had emerged; one of the children was caught and smacked on the back of the thighs by its mother; a fat man in a blue suit dropped an ice-cream cone which was pecked away by the birds; the clock that could be heard only within a radius of three blocks of the old post office struck the single wavering note of one o’clock and then the half-hour; and still the man did not move, sitting with his leg crossed over the other at the knee, arms folded, head sunk forward like that of someone who has dozed during a speech. A pigeon alighted on his shoulder and took off clumsily again.
But that moment in which the bird had paused, cocking its beak, indifferent busybody, changed the awareness of the freckled girl and her boy; of Rosa Burger; of the mother and the two little children, the man in the blue suit. They looked at each other as if each had a sudden question to ask. They all began to watch the man. The children’s mouths opened. They pressed back against their mother’s side and she moved away from the demand, shifting supermarket carriers as a claim defended, an alibi of the normality of her pr
esence ; resting there with her kids in the square, waiting for the time to catch a bus or be fetched by a husband. Now other people from benches farther off, from the grass, approached. Two hobos came over hunched towards each other, hands making intimate sign-language, and the one tried to restrain the other while he took the man on the bench by the shoulder the pigeon had landed on, and called a name. Hey Doug, come on, man, Doug. The man did not wake up but did not fall over. He stayed, solid as the statue of the landdrost, as if at the axis where one knee crossed the other he was secured to the bench as the landdrost was fixed to his plinth by bronze prongs.
The two friends backed away, whispering and challenging.
The freckled girl’s boyfriend turned to Rosa in triumph, with an answer, not a question.—You know what ?—the bloke’s dead.—
—Ooooh, I’m getting out of here.—His girl was shaking her hands from the wrists, urgently.
The two little boys moved nearer and were stopped by their mother—Come away!—
No policeman was about but someone fetched a traffic officer and he had in his hand a first-aid box of the kind with a toy axe attached buses carry along for emergencies.
People pressed forward all round Rosa where she stood as if waiting to be told, to have some indication whether to go this way or that. Only the man himself took no notice. The black men who had lain on the grass like dead men got up and came to look at him.
Rosa, moving away out of the small crowd, entered the strands of pedestrians crossing the street, intersecting with the strands coming across from the other side, as a thief makes himselfindistinguishable from any other passer-by.
I worked for a trade journal, for a man who imported cosmetics and perfume, for an investment adviser. I gave up my hospital profession when I left you and the cottage. I was living alone for the first time in my life: without a stake of responsibility in that of anyone else. For us—coming from that house—that was the real definition of loneliness: to live without social responsibility.
There had been deaths in my father’s house but the death of a tramp in the park was in a sense the first for me. I ate my lunch there nearly always when I was working for Barry Eckhard, the finance man. Up on the twenty-sixth floor the smoked glass windows made the climate of each day the same cool mean, neither summer nor winter, and the time something neither night nor day; I came down into the city to repossess a specific sense of these things. I came to be anonymous, to be like other people. Although Barry’s offices concealed their function behind the penthouse style, not only banks’ pot plants but also original indigenous sculpture and a chrome table game that, set in motion, illustrated a Newtonian principle of dynamics, he enjoyed revealing to clients who seemed all to be first-name friends that his ‘girl Friday’ was Lionel Burger’s daughter. Sometimes she was invited along with them to expensive restaurants where their simple lunches of grilled kingklip were proof that they were not vulgar tycoons.
In the little public square I went to no one recognized me and so no one saw me. I ate my sandwiches, like everybody else, there, while the man died, or was dead already when we grouped ourselves round him as we did in relation to each other: the black labourers washed up from the streets prostrate upon the bit of grass, not yet ready for the kind of token comfort of white-collar workers so recently opened to blacks by the desegregation of the benches, the coloured factory girls signalling in their teasing manner of eating the sexual self-confidence Indian girls, huddled like nuns, were denied, the couple from the Post Office whose privacy the presence of all of us hedged, I myself making the choice of this bench rather than that because a member of the resident sherry gang sometimes struck up a tedious conversation or—worse—talked to himself. I had quickly discovered it’s unbearable to sit on a park bench beside a stranger who is talking to himself aloud as you are doing silently.
The evening newspaper spread across three columns a photograph taken of the dead man on the bench by some keen amateur who happened to have had the good luck to be in the right place at the right time. The space was as much as was customarily given to a daily series of girls on beaches from Ostia to Sydney. The caption drew upon the melodramatic romantic platitude of the ‘heartlessness’ of the city. (The two little boys were in the picture, mouths open, gazing.) But there was nothing cruel and indifferent about our eating our lunches, making love or sleeping off a morning’s work while a man, simulating life with one leg easily and almost elegantly crossed over the other, died or was dying. He looked as if he were alive. He gave no sign of injury, pain or distress, he was not held between the uniformed bodies of custodians, looking out where he could not run, he was not caged in court or cell, or holding out, as a beggar has nothing to present but his stump, a paper for the official stamp that is always denied him. The whole point was that I—we—all of us were exonerated. What could we have done ? It was not a matter of help that could be given or withheld. Not a matter of the kiss of life or massaging a heart. Nothing could change the isolation of that man. What could we have known that would have made it possible to understand how he left us while among us, went away without crumpling a paper carton or throwing the skeleton of a bunch of grapes into the bin; stayed with us, as a shape of arranged flesh, when he was not there. The post office clerk and his girl could not do more than kiss. He had to keep his hands off her breasts and keep a newspaper or jacket across his lap to hide the swelling of his arousal to life. But this man who crossed his legs conversationally, whose arms were folded attentively—only his head had nodded off, drooped with the heat or boredom, it could happen to anybody—he carried through the unspeakable act in our presence. He made final the unfinished take-away chicken meal, the fondling half-mating that was as far as DARLENE and her boy could go. He concluded the digestive cycles and procreative tentatives around him by completing the imperative, the ultimate necessity. We saw and heard nothing.
I didn’t go back to eat in the square and I didn’t cut out the photograph. I knew the arch of the foot that was cocked over the knee, quite a high arch, which gives a foot a nice line, and the shoes not particularly worn since brown suede seems to look right only when rather shabby. The paper said the man’s name was Ronald Ferguson, 46, an ex-miner, no fixed abode. He drank methylated spirits and slept in bus shelters. There is an element of human wastage in all societies. But—in that house—it was believed that when we had changed the world (yes, in spite of, beyond the purges, the liquidations, the forced labour and imprisonments)—the ‘elimination of private conflicts set up by the competitive nature of capitalist society’ would help people to live, even people like this one, who, although white and privileged under the law of the country, couldn’t make a place for himself. I had seen my brother dead and my mother and father; each time the event itself, so close to me, was obscured from me by sorrow and explained by accident, illness, or imprisonment. It was caused by the chlorinated water with flecks of his pink breakfast bacon in it that I saw pumped from my brother’s mouth when he was taken from the pool; by that paralysis that blotted out my mother limb by limb; by the fever that my father smelled of, dying for his beliefs in a prison hospital.
But this death was the mystery itself. The death you were talking about; in the cottage. Circumstantial causes are not the cause: we die because we live, yes, and there was no way for me to understand what I was walking away from in the park. There was no way to deal with this happening but to gather the little plastic-foam tray and cellophane from which I’d eaten my lunch and go over and put it, as every day, as everyone else must, in the waste bin hooked to a pole. The revolution we lived for in that house would change the lives of the blacks who left their hovels and compounds at four in the morning to swing picks, hold down jack-hammers and chant under the weight of girders, building shopping malls and office towers in which whites like my employer Barry Eckhard and me moved in an ‘environment’ without sweat or dust. It would change the days of the labourers who slept off their exhaustion on the grass like dead men, while the ma
n died. The children the white couple would make in their whites’ suburb would not inherit the house bought on the municipal loan available to whites, or slot safely into jobs reserved for whites against black competition. Black children—it was promised—would not have to live off the leavings we threw into the bin. Eckhard’s clients would no longer get rich by the effort of a phone-call to authorize a sale on the stock exchange. All that might change. But the change from life to death—what had all the certainties I had from my father to do with that? When the hunger ended and the kwashiorkor was wiped out as malaria was in the colonial era, when there were no rents extorted and no privately-owned mansions and cosy white bungalows, no white students in contemplative retreat where blacks could not live; when the people owned the means of production of gold, diamonds, uranium, copper and coal, all the mineral riches that had rolled to the bottom of the sack of Africa—one would be left with that. Nothing that had served to make us sure of what we were doing and why had anything to do with what was happening one lunchtime while I was in the square. I was left with that. It had been left out. Justice, equality, the brotherhood of man, human dignity—but it will still be there, I looked away everywhere from the bench and saw it still, when—at last—I had seen it once.
Baasie never came back to live in the Burger house.
Her brother Tony boasted to the little boys of the neighbourhood how he could dive and was drowned in the swimming-pool.
Rosa Burger was unable to make out, driving over the freeway in her car, where the corrugated-iron cottage had been bulldozed. Old loquat trees suggesting those that had grown near the roadmakers’ camp were incorporated into the landscaping of the shoulders of the freeway, but the bauhinia was not where she would have thought it might still stand.
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