Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  Clare Terblanche decided the flat wouldn’t do. Perhaps now that she has told me the special circumstances of her relationship with the prospective tenant she does not want her to live in the building where I might bump into the two of them together, and she would know that I was seeing them in the light of the confidence she had forced on me and already regretted.

  Just as we were leaving the place she became absent or even agitated for a moment—I thought she’d forgotten something, left a cigarette not stubbed. Kneeling swiftly she tore sheets out of the telephone directory and then strode over to the cupboard. Picking up the sanitary towel between paper, she lifted it out without touching it with her hands and bundled up a crude parcel. Then she did not know where to put it; no bin in an empty flat. Outside on the fire escape some tenant had abandoned cartons. She lifted the top two and buried her burden, ramming the cartons back, and then stalked ahead of me as if she had successfully disposed of a body.

  Only the dove could find you, that’s the idea. No claims from the world reach the ark. While you are fleeing, brave young people welcomed by the local newspaper in each foreign port, you scrub the decks in absolution and eat the bread of an innocence you can’t assume. Lionel would have explained why. If I do, you will say it’s because I’m his daughter, mouthing that spinning-wheels and the bran-and-whole-wheat you used to bake in the cottage cannot restore some imaginary paradise of pre-capitalist production. People won’t let Lionel die; or his assumption—of knowledge, responsibility shouldered staggeringly to the point of arrogance—won’t die with him and let them alone. But the faithful don’t commemorate the date of his death, they don’t have to; sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next. Flora sends me Spanish irises on William’s account at a florist. The man who’s writing the biography phones to ask whether I would prefer to change our today’s appointment for another day ?

  There were two letters behind the locked tin flap bearing my number in the block of mailboxes grey as prison cells in the foyer. The one was from Sweden. I read a whole paragraph before I understood from whom; it was hand-written and any others I had received from him had always been typed. Strange not to know the handwriting of someone with whom you have made love, no matter why or how long ago. He had hoped to be able to tell me that the film about Lionel was at last to be distributed in England, but negotiations had fallen through. He would have to wait until ‘something happened in South Africa to rouse interest again’. It was easier to sell material dealing with Moçambique and Angola, at present. He had heard with much pleasure about the wing in the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow being named after my father. He had written a short piece on this and hoped it would be published soon. Because his film has not realized his hopes that it would make a name for him, that time when Lionel was alive in prison does not seem to him, as it is for Lionel and me, long ago. It is linked to what is as yet unachieved, the Swede’s success.

  The other letter was not really a letter but a card, closely-written across the inner side of the leaves. I didn’t know one could buy cards for the anniversary of deaths—deckle-edged, gilded, posied, that’s certainly the sort of thing you’re safe from, cut adrift: the ordering of appropriate responses for all occasions, what you used to call ‘consumer love’, Conrad. I read the signature first; someone had signed for both: ‘Uncle Coen and Auntie Velma’ but the correspondent was clearly Auntie Velma alone. She was firmly confident as ever in her concept of feelings towards me, the last of her brother’s family. I am always welcome at the farm if I want a quiet rest. She does not ask from what activity, she does not want to know in case it is, as her brother’s always was, something she fears and disapproves to the point of inconceivability. It’s better that way. She offers neither expectations nor reproach. ‘The farm is always there.’ She believes that: for ever. The future—it’s the same as now. It will be occupied by her children, that’s all. Maybe there’ll be some improvements; change is automation in the milking sheds, and television, promised soon. My cousin, fellow namesake of Ouma Marie Burger, is seeing the world at present. She has a job with the citrus export board and has been sent to the Paris office—isn’t that nice ? She had to learn French and picked it up very quickly—she has the ‘Burger brains, of course’. What Auntie Velma has in mind there is quite simply my father. The Nels have never had any difficulty in reconciling pride in belonging to a remarkable family with the certainty that the member who made it so followed wicked and horrifying ideals. Even Uncle Coen is pleased to be known as Lionel Burger’s brother-in-law. Whatever my father was to them, it still stalks their consciousness.

  Another thing in the Swede’s letter: he wanted a beaded belt like the one he had bought here, did I remember the shop ? The shop is a good-works affair, marketing the objects tribal blacks make for their own use and adornment, rather than tourist handicrafts. Like most non-profit enterprises, it is not efficiently run and I didn’t have much hope that whoever was in charge would be able to remember let alone be willing to bother to obtain a belt of a particular workmanship—the letter was precise, said Baca, but I didn’t think it could be that, more likely from Transkei or Zululand. Sheila Itholeng was there as usual on a Saturday morning to clean the flat and do my washing: the room comes to life. She cooks mealie meal and I fry eggs and bacon and we have breakfast together like a family. Neither of us has a husband but she has a child. I have bought little Mpho crayons and plasticine but around our legs under the table she was playing at polishing the floor with a bit of rag, her small bottom higher than her head, her pinkish heels turned out just the way her mother’s do.

  Although Barry Eckhard doesn’t make his employees work on Saturdays, I went to town. In the traffic I suddenly began to try to consider this day as something specific as that belt beaded by hand I was going to look for, the duplication of a day in which, this time a year ago, Lionel was still alive, although by midday it was to be the day when he died. He and my mother once went to Lenin’s tomb, I’m told. They filed past, muffled up out of all recognition against a cold that doesn’t exist here, as an endless queue is still doing. Every November will file past my father’s death, the same day over and over again, with summer storm skies and street jacarandas merging hecticly in electric purple; seasons can only repeat themselves, they have no future. On the park bench there was also a lying-in-state.

  A cordon of police flanked the entire façade of the building where the African crafts shop is. Alsatian dogs strapped to their handlers kept passers-by back but they waited stolidly, blacks holding delivery bicycles, Saturday-shopping families with children, couples with lovers’ arms dangling from shoulders or round the waist of one another’s jeans, wanting their spectacle, whether it were to be a black pop group that transforms the rhythms of the street, a suicide teetering on a parapet, a bomb hoax. I knew at once what it would be: men and women, ordinary-looking—amazing!—like themselves, led out under arrest and followed by more policemen, jaws steadying loads of papers and typewriters. The building housed organizations whose premises are often raided. I didn’t wait to see which it was this time—the association of black studies or the militant churchmen, all suspected of ‘furthering’ the aims my father and his associates took so many years to formulate. There was silence from the crowd standing by like tethered horses. A woman with a black woman’s bundle on her head and the long-nosed, keen bitter face that often comes with admixture of white blood, drunk or a little crazy, addressed everybody from a round hole of a mouth.

  —Bloody white bastard. Bloody police bastard.—Two young black men wearing T-shirts with the legends PRINCETON UNIVERSITY and KUNG-FU laughed at her. An older man called deeply, ‘Tula, mama’ and, a stray not knowing the source of the noise of the tin can tied to it, she grumbled back Voetsak, voetsak, wena.

  I didn’t linger. The police demand identification and search everyone they find in a raided building; why should the Special Branch believe Burger’s daughter’s presence in the vicinity was to be explained by in
tention to buy a beaded belt at the request of a former lover? Let others protest their innocence, the water on their hands, like Pilate’s. As craziness gave the crone licence to shout at the police, the life sentence gave Lionel licence to say it from the dock: I would be guilty if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country. If I’m guilty of that innocence the police will not be the ones with the right to apprehend me.

  Some of the big stores have boutiques where they sell African crafts. This follows a demand, the wave of nostalgia for the ethnic in parts of the world where ethnics are put to no sinister purpose. It’s currently fashionable merchandise that’s on display, rather than anything understood as national culture; Buy South African refers to manufactured goods and not to the carved bowls and ostrich-shell necklaces hanging somewhere between small leather-goods and cosmetic counters. The store I tried didn’t have beaded belts but I thought the wristbands, athletically, orthopaedically masculine, with bright plastic thongs woven through holes in the tough leather, worn by migratory mineworkers who made them, could be worn effectively by a Scandinavian Africa specialist, and I bought one, god knows why. The huge perfumed street floor of the shop tented the pleasure of people spending money, that peculiar atmosphere of desire and anxious satisfaction evident in the faces, hardly high enough to chin showcases, of children gathered at troughs of cheap array, and women matching colours under the advice of bosom friends, and couples conspiring over price; the spectacle, of objects they can never own as well as those which bait from them the money they have, people yearn for in the countries of the Future my father visited with both his wives. Any one of the coloured artisans and their families or the white student lovers watching arrests a few blocks away was free to enter and see legitimate aspirations that carry no risk of punishment—fully automatic washing machines, electronic watches, cowboy boots, recordings of popular music by heroes who take their groups’ names from the vocabulary of revolution. The act of acquisition. You have to acquire a yacht to escape it. A woman beside me as I waited to pay opposed her little boy: But you don’t want that? What’ll you do with it? It’s not a toy! He held tightly a patent fluff-removing brush and would not meet anyone’s eyes.

  Leaning on her elbow at the cosmetic counter opposite I saw the half-bare back of a black woman dressed in splashing colour which included as overall effect the colour of her skin. The boldest, darkest lines of blue and brown, ancient ideogrammatic symbols of fish, bird and conch were extended in the movement of two rounded shoulder-blades from the matt slope of the neck to their perfect centring on the indented line of spine, rippling as shadowless store lighting ran a scale down it. The cloth suggested robes but was in fact cut tight to the proud backside jutting negligently at the angle of the weight-bearing hip, and close to the long legs. There was a blue turban, and before the head turned, the tilt of a gold hoop bigger than a tiny ear. She could have been a splendid chorus girl but she looked like a queen of some prototype, extinct in Britain or Denmark where the office still exists. She was Marisa Kgosana. We embraced, and the professionally neutral face of the white cosmetic saleswoman, protected by her make-up from any sign of reaction as a soldier on guard is protected by his uniform from blinking an eye before public taunts, awaited the completion of the sale.

  To touch in women’s token embrace against the live, night cheek of Marisa, seeing huge for a second the lake-flash of her eye, the lilac-pink of her inner lip against translucent-edged teeth, to enter for a moment the invisible magnetic field of the body of a beautiful creature and receive on oneself its imprint—breath misting and quickly fading on a glass pane—this was to immerse in another mode of perception. As near as a woman can get to the transformation of the world a man seeks in the beauty of a woman. Marisa is black; near, then, as well, to the white way of using blackness as a way of perceiving a sensual redemption, as romantics do, or of perceiving fears, as racialists do. In my father’s house, the one was seen as the obverse of the other, two sides of false consciousness—that much I can add to anyone’s notes. But even in that house blackness was a sensuous-redemptive means of perception. Through blackness is revealed the way to the future. The descendants of Chaka, Dingane, Hintsa, Sandile, Moshesh, Cetewayo, Msilekazi and Sekukuni are the only ones who can get us there; the spirit of Makana is on Robben Island as intercessor to Lenin. Sipho Mokoena who made kites for Tony and showed children the rip in his trouser-leg made by a bullet, Gana Makabeni who was best man at the wedding and Isaac Vulindlela who gave his only son, Baasie, to the care of my father and mother; Uncle Coen Nel’s barman, Daniel; the watchman who brought bets for you to place—the creased, pale-soled black feet naked at the swimming-pool as well as the black faces in the majority at the last of the underground congresses my father could attend: in the merger of white Cain, black Abel, a new brotherhood of flesh is the way to the final brotherhood. The middle-aged cosmetic saleswoman and the few customers not too self-absorbed to glance up saw a kaffir-boetie girl being kissed by a black. That’s all. They knew no better. That house was closer to reaching its kind of reality through your kind of reality than I understood. You and I argued in the cottage. Sex and death, you said. The only reality. I should have been able to explain the element of sensuality that would have qualified the experiences of that house to be considered real by you. I felt it in Marisa’s presence, after so long; the comfort of Baasie in the same bed when the dark made that house creak with threats.

  Marisa was buying face-cream, testing brands on the back of a hand laid for the saleswoman’s attention between them on the counter. The hand wore its insignia of rings and long brilliant nails as a general wears gold braid and campaign ribbons. Didn’t I think this smelled too much like a sweet cake ?—Over-ripe fruit, to me.—

  —Violets, madam—The saleswoman was earnest.

  No, no, it wouldn’t do; but Marisa wouldn’t take the other brand being rubbed onto her plum-dark skin with a rapid to-and-fro of one white finger.—D’you know what they charge for that, Rosa ? I’d rather get wrinkles.—The saleswoman had another, a tube, French but not expensive, one need use so little, herb-scented. Marisa had the air of someone who is never undecided.—Okay. That’ll do. The nail stuff, the cream, nothing else. But Rosa, if you’re working in that building, I’m just around the corner! An attorney’s. Someone Theo found—she laughed, sharing our admittance of the use everyone made of Theo, our dependency on him at the trials of her husband, Joseph Kgosana, or my father, as women share faith in a good doctor.—I’d only started, not even a week—then I got permission for a visit. I’m just back from the Island.—

  How splendidly she made the trip. In one sentence she and I were alone; even if the elderly blonde, who had put on glasses dangling from a gilt chain to write the sales slip, understood which island, neither she nor the other customers trailing the aisles in perfume and light stood in intelligence of the level of the gaze at which Marisa held me. Hardly a change of tone needed between us. For Marisa it seems easy. She doesn’t have to find a solemn face, acknowledge the distance between the prison and the cosmetic counter. She doesn’t close away, go to cover, dead still, as I do. She doesn’t have to recourse to putting things delicately or explaining herself for fear of being misunderstood or misjudged. Defiance and confidence don’t mourn; her beauty and the way she assumes it are stronger than any declaration.

  How was he ? How are they all ? When we talk about them, the prisoners who have survived Lionel, the tone is purposely commonplace, an assertion that they can’t be shut away, they remain part of ordinary daily life no matter how thick the walls or rough the seas between banishment and home.—He’s fine. I was the one under the weather. It’s true—really the weather! There was a gale blowing in Cape Town! You can’t imagine what it was like. The first day the boat couldn’t go at all. The next day the police in my escort weren’t too keen either but I said, look, I insist, here’s my permit, I’m only allowed out of my magisterial area three days... so we got into the boat. I felt terrible—m
y god, have you ever been seasick ? But I held out. And I could see they were much worse than me. First thing Joe said, Marisa! Look at you—there’s been something wrong and you didn’t say in letters... He got his warder to bring me strong coffee—yes, just like that: my wife must have a hot drink—you know ? And that one brought it like a lamb.—