Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  —I don’t want to telephone you at work.—

  The statement was turned aside.

  —Oh it’s all right, they know I haven’t a phone here. I should’ve let you know about the flat, I’m sorry. I looked at it—but it’s a back one, on the ground floor, awfully dark, I don’t really think... And then when I heard nothing from you—why didn’t you pop into the office and see me in all my splendour—

  —I don’t want to come there.—

  Clare handed back the glass. Rosa hesitated a moment, expecting it to be put down on the table.

  —Oh.—With the empty glass she accepted that it was not about the vacant flat they were talking. The kettle shrieked like a toy train.

  —It’s okay. Go on.—

  She called from the kitchen, hospitable—Won’t be a minute.—

  Clare Terblanche was not in the chair but standing about in the room. At the balcony door she rattled the handle but the door merely heaved in its frame.

  —The catch is at the top.—

  Rosa came and stood beside her for a moment looking out with her at the hillside of roofs and trees dropping away below the building; between blackish evergreens a cumulus of jacarandas, yellowed before their leaves fall, like some blossoming reversal of seasons in the warm winter day. But she was not seeing what the tall girl had in her mind’s eye.

  —Should we go outside.—

  Rosa’s lips gave a puff of dismissal.—If you want.—With polite routine consideration she leant over and turned on the portable radio that lay on a pile of newspapers and records. Clare Terblanche’s curious expression of finding fault settled at the record player, with its two speakers on the floor. Rosa unplugged the cord; closed the doors to the kitchen and bathroom; sat down—well!—before the coffee. The radio aerial was telescoped into the retracted position and reception was blurred by static interference.

  —In that building—where you work now. It’s where a lot of advocates have their chambers, isn’t it ?—

  —The whole of the seventh and eighth floors. They’ve got a communal law library and a canteen—or rather a dining hall.—

  The announcer’s voice was reciting with the promiscuous intimacy of his medium a list of birthday, anniversary and lovers’ greetings for military trainees on border duty. ...and for Robert Rousseau-hullo there Bob-Dawn and Flippy, Mom and Dad, thinking of you always...

  —Is it true most other people in the building use a photocopying and duplicating room belonging to them ?—

  Although Clare Terblanche did not see the offices where now and then a pigeon rang against the smoky topaz glass like a shot from the streets far below, breaking its neck, Rosa saw what Clare did, now. Hennie Joubert, your sweetheart Elsabe... An expression of recognition, of expectation without surprise, a nostalgia, almost, slightly crinkled the delicately darkened skin round Rosa’s eyes.—I don’t know about most. Quite a few. Barry Eckhard’s firm has an arrangement—...missing you lots darling...also Patricia, Uncle Tertius and Auntie Penny in Sasolburg...

  So the other—Clare—knew; or confirmed a hope:—Eckhard’s has an arrangement.—At the inner starting-point of each eyebrow a few hairs, like Dick’s her father’s stood up—hackles that gave intensity to her face. She rubbed between them with the voluptuousness of assuagement; the peeling eczema danced into life and a patch of red gauze appeared on the white healthy skin of either cheek.—I don’t suppose you use it yourself.—

  ...love you very much see you soon... Rosa Burger was off hand and informative. It was not easy to hear her; the other girl concentrated on her lips.—Usually there’s a clerk who does. If I need photocopying done, I give it to him.—

  —And I believe the room’s down on the second floor.—

  —It is.—...thinking of you god bless thumbs up...

  —Is it kept locked ?—

  —It’s open while Chambers are. Same hours as most offices. But Clare, it’s no good—With just such a smile, unanswerable, demanding, her father had invaded people’s lives, getting them to do things.

  Clare Terblanche was confronted with it as a refusal.—Of course I know. You’re watched. (There was music now, the muezzin cry of a pop singer.) If you were to start being seen down there we wouldn’t last a week. I don’t mean you. But if you could just get the key for an hour. Just the key. Only long enough for us to have a duplicate made. Who’d ever know? Someone will come in between midnight when the cleaners have left, and the early hours of the morning. The person’ll bring our own rolls of paper so that can’t be traced; it won’t be the paper that’s normally used there.—

  —It’s no good.—A complicated sequence of drumming had taken over from the singer.

  —The Eckhard office does have a key? What happens when the courts are in recess, when the advocates are on holiday ?—

  The moonstone-coloured eyes under dabs of shadow gazed back, sought no evasion or escape.—The photocopying service still operates. We do have a key, yes. In case the office needs to use the room after Chambers are closed.—

  —So all the other firms in the building that use the room have keys, too—exactly. We only need Eckhard’s for about twenty minutes! Lunch hour; nobody’ll be there to notice it’s gone before it’ll be back.—

  Resistance brought them closer and closer to one another although they had not moved.

  Rosa Burger’s body rather than her face expressed an open obstinacy—the arms thrust down at her sides, the hands, palms on the seat of the chair, pushed in and hidden beneath thighs neatly placed—an obstinacy that came to the Terblanche girl as a demand she didn’t understand, rather than a refusal. She trembled on the verge of hostility; they were aware of each other for a moment as females.

  Rosa Burger’s prim thighs closed at the bony outline of pubis in shrunken jeans, a long sunburned neck with the cup at the collar-bones where—she sat so still, no nerves, she did not fidget—a pulse could be seen beating: Noel de Witt’s girl; also the mistress of a Swede (at least; of those that were known) who had passed through, and some silent bearded blond fellow, not someone who belonged, not he, either. A body with the assurance of embraces, as cultivated intelligence forms a mind. Men would recognize it at a glance as the other can be recognized at a word.

  Clare Terblanche—the old playmate who had been thick and sturdy as a teddy-bear, little legs and arms the same simplified shape, furry with white down that brushed by, in tussles, smelling sweetly of Palmolive soap—her flesh was dumb. She lived inside there, usefully employing now tall, dependable legs that carried one haunch before the other until she found the flat. A poor circulation (showing itself in the pallor and flush of the face), breasts folded over against themselves, a soft expanse of belly to shelter children. A body that had no signals; it would grow larger and at once more self-effacing. Few men would find their way, seek her through it.

  There was the table between them at the level of their calves; music and voices, fake sentiment, generalized emotion, public exposure passing for private need. ...and one for Billy Stewart. Billyboy I’ll bet that’s what they call you at home anyway Billy granma andgranpa Davis are proud of you keepsmiling allathome love you waiting for you my darling Koosie—

  Rosa suddenly got up and cut off the voice.

  —Perhaps you want to look at the flat anyway ?—

  Clare Terblanche did not answer. She drank from her coffee-mug in slow gulps they both heard.—All right.—

  She seemed chastened, chastised.

  At the door she stopped, turning back on the girl behind her. —It is just this you won’t do ?—

  I am not the only survivor.

  Her crepe soles made the searing squeak of fingers dragged over a balloon that Tony used to torment me with when we were little. I fetched that key at once (she must have found it ironic) from the caretaker and we went down the ringing iron steps of the fire escape. In the empty flat there was an old telephone directory, a population of fish-moth in the bath; cockroaches in the kitchen, a sanitary towel
dried stiff to the shape in which it had been worn, left inside the cupboard I opened to show what storage-space was provided. Both were duly shocked at this example of the civilized habits whites were dedicated to maintaining against black degradation (these are the sort of reactions that come to me when I am back among my own kind). Anyway, both of us are nicely-brought-up girls, fastidiously middle-class in many ways—remember the high standard of comfort you remarked in my father’s house—although if the class membership of our respective families were to be correctly defined by place in production relations, she was working-class and I was not. Our kind has never been dirty or hungry although prison and exile are commonplaces of family life to us. Being white constitutes a counter-definition whose existence my father and her mother were already arguing between dancing to the gramophone at the workers’ club. I shut the cupboard with some sort of exclamation.

  Wires were wrenched off at the wainscot where the telephone had been. The smell of her cigarette crept round like a suspicious animal. Freed even of inanimate witnesses, we did not know how to get away from one another—at least, she did not know how to make me feel demeaned by my refusal. On the contrary. I was aware of an unpleasant strength bearing upon her from me. She’s something sad rather than ugly, a woman without sexual pride—as a female she has no vision of herself to divert others from her physical defects. The way she stood—it irritated me. Clare Terblanche has always stood like that, as if someone plonked down a tripod, without the flow of her movement behind her or projected ahead of her! There’s an ordinary explanation: knock-kneed. Why didn’t Dick and Ivy have her treated when we were little ? The dandruff, and the eczema it caused, they were of nervous origin. Why did we pretend not to notice this affliction ? It was ‘unimportant’. She knew I was seeing her clumsy stance, the tormenting patches of inflamed and shedding skin, stripped of familiar context. Poor thing; and she knew I thought: poor thing. I am able to withstand other people’s silences without discomfiture. I felt pity and curiosity, slightly cruel. I might just as well have reached out and taken her roughly by the shoulder, no one was there to hear or overhear us, no voice of pulp goodwill overlaid indiscretion and glossed heresy. I can’t speak loudly; it’s not my nature, even in insolence. I said to her, Why do you go on with it ?

  She was not sure she understood me. Or she understood instantly; I had an impatient sense that I was part of her mental process, I was there, taking fright at what exists only once it has been spoken. She tried an interpretation as a specific reference: without me, without the photocopies at Barry Eckhard’s building—oh, she would find some other possibility. Although (half-offended, half-appealing for sympathy) for the moment she was damned if she knew what.

  I began to recite a quiet liturgy.—The people will no longer tolerate. The people’s birthright. The day has come when the people demand—

  She stared at me as if I were shouting.

  I spoke with interest, nothing more.—When you see reports of the evidence in newspapers, doesn’t it sound ridiculous ? Still the kits with invisible ink, the forged passports, the secret plans kept like dry cleaners’ slips, the mailing-lists, the same old story of people who are ‘approached’ and turn state witness after having licked some envelopes... You want to laugh, you can’t help it; it’s pathetic. You’ll print your news-sheet or you’ll send out your leaflets. It’s all decided already, from the beginning, before you’ve begun. A few pieces of paper, a few months, and you’ll be caught. You’ll be traced easily or someone you’ve trusted will get twenty rand and sell you. An enemy of the people... You’ll disappear into detention. Maybe there’ll be a case and a lawyer who tries for mitigation, shaming you by making all the old slogans mean less than they mean.—

  Her face slowly thickened and concentrated before me the way the faces of patients at the hospital would register an injection releasing the sensation of some substance into the bloodstream.

  —And you’ll go inside. Like them. You’ll come out. Like them—We saw Ivy and Dick and Lionel.

  Tears pushed magnifying lenses up over her eyes and she had to hold them wide so that I should not see drops fall.

  She didn’t know how to tell me, me of all people, what she knew we knew. It will be there for everyone to read in the critical study of my father’s life—without giving away any useful information about how the struggle is being carried on in the present; of that I have been assured. There is nothing but failure, until the day the Future is achieved. It is the only success. Others—in specific campaigns with specific objectives, against the pass laws, against forced dispossession of land—would lead to piecemeal reforms. These actions fail one after another, they have failed since before we were born; failures were the events of our childhood, failures are the normal circumstances of our adulthood—her parents under house arrest, my father dead in jail, my courting done in the prison visiting room. In this experience of being crushed on individual issues the masses come, as they can in no other way, to understand that there is no other way: state power must be overthrown. Failure is the accumulated heritage of resistance without which there is no revolution. The chapter will be headed by a maxim from Marx which Lionel Burger spoke from the dock before he was sentenced. ‘World history would indeed be very easy to make if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favourable chances.’

  Her words threshed about, clutched at indignation and slid into dismay.—But Rosa! They’ve had the worst of it. It’ll be different for us. Whatever happens, we’re lucky to be born later—

  We were suddenly plunged, reckless in confession, pooling the forbidden facts of life.

  —Exactly what your father says.—This kind of thing you’re doing, does it make sense to you ?—

  She looked the way I must have, for you, when you described to me watching your mother and her lover fucking in the spare bedroom. She would deal with what was put before her without allowing herself to see it, just as I did.—It’s part of the strategy of the struggle. In the present phase—still. That’s all there is to it. But you know.—

  Of course I know. I could have quoted General Giap’s definition of the art of insurrection as knowing how to find forms of struggle appropriate to the political situation at each stage. The huge strikes of black workers in Natal with which her mother will have become involved even if they were spontaneous to begin with, these are an example of Lenin’s observation that the people sense sooner than the leaders the change in the objective conditions of struggle, yes. But the necessity for political propaganda remains. Someone must photocopy the open letter to Vorster. At the risk of encouraging adventurism, the necessity remains for the few white revolutionaries to be provided with a role. As long ago as 1962 it is documented that my father was one of those, at last mainly black, at the sixth underground conference of the South African Communist Party who achieved the final perspective, the ideological integration, the synthesis of twenty years’ dialectic: it is just as impossible to conceive of workers’ power separated from national liberation as it is to conceive of true national liberation separated from the destruction of capitalism. The future he was living for until the day he died can be achieved only by black people with the involvement of the small group of white revolutionaries who have solved the contradiction between black consciousness and class consciousness, and qualify to make unconditional common cause with the struggle for full liberation, e.g., a national and social revolution. It is necessary for these few to come into the country secretly or be recruited within it from among the bad risks, romantic journalists and students, as well as the good risks, the children, lovers and friends of the old guard, and for them to be pinched off between the fingers of the Special Branch one by one, in full possession of their invisible ink, their clandestine funds, their keys (provided by another sort of bad risk) to the offices of prominent financiers with photocopiers. Such things are ridiculous (like a child’s ‘rude’ drawing of the primal mystery of the mating act)—she could hardly believe the stupid da
ring, the lifting of my shoulders against shameful laughter forcing its way past suppression in my face—only if one steps aside out of one’s historically-determined role and cannot read their meaning. These are—we are—the instruments of struggle appropriate to this phase. I looked at her, inciting us.—What conformists: the children of our parents.—

  —Dick and Ivy conformists!—Her face screwed towards me.

  —Not them—us. Did you ever think of that ? Other people break away. They live completely different lives. Parents and children don’t understand each other—there’s nothing to say, between them. Some sort of natural insurance against repetition... Not us. We live as they lived.—

  —Oh, bourgeois freedoms. It’s not possible for us. We want something else. Christ, I don’t have to fight poor old Dick and Ivy for it—it doesn’t matter if they bug me in plenty of ways, my mother particularly. They want it too.—

  —But were you given a choice ? Just think.—

  —Yes... I suppose if you want to look at it like that... But no! Rosa! What choice? Rosa? In this country, under this system, looking at the way blacks live—what has the choice to do with parents ? What else could you choose ?—She was excited now, had the gleam of someone who feels she is gaining influence, drew back the unfallen tears through her nose in ugly snorts. It’s axiomatic the faults you see in others are often your own; the critical are the self-despising. But this’s something different. Not a mote in the eye. That girl whom I pitied, at whom my curiosity was directed, so different from me in the ‘unimportant’ aspects—I watched her as if she were myself. I wanted something from the victim in her and perhaps I got it.

  As for her, she mistook the heat of my determination for warmth between us—but that I feel only for her mother and father. She felt she had established fresh contact, other than the outgrown childhood one. Attracted by the possibility of friendship with me—she is graceless rather than shy, used to dodging the cuffs of rebuff—she forgot I had failed her—us—our way of life. As a clenched fist opens on its treasures, bits of stone in the eyes of a stranger, she told me about the man she was in love with, hesitating over his name and withholding it. Then I couldn’t stop her telling me that the girl and baby, her friend with a child, for whom she wanted a flat, was married to him although they weren’t living together. The girl was ‘a terrific person’, they ‘really get on’. She is the daughter of a professor, an associate of my father who fled long ago and teaches in a black country. The professor’s hostage to the future: Clare Terblanche will recruit her, if the remark that they ‘really get on’ doesn’t already mean she is coming up from the Cape because the strategy of the present phase requires this. The lover, the husband—he’s one of us, too. Jealousy and anguish between the three of them (perhaps the professor’s daughter is really coming to try to get back her man ?) is something they will know they must not allow to interfere with what they have to do. Clare Terblanche will rub exasperatedly at the naked patches, like peeling paintwork, on her poor face and snap at her mother, Ivy, who (it comes out between girl-friends in confession) is working with the lover on his Wages Commission. But Clare Terblanche’s pride and guilt at sleeping with the other’s man, the temptation of being preferred, the pain of being rejected—who knows how it will resolve itself (it’s the sort of thing we like to leave to women’s magazines)—these will not interfere with the work to be done. It is only people who wallow in the present who submit. My mother didn’t, as Lily Letsile demanded, ‘fill up that hole’ where my brother drowned. The swimming-pool remained to give pleasure to other people, black children who had never been into a pool before could be taught to swim there by my father.