Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  The little Rôse left behind the summer dresses Gaby Grosbois had made her because English autumns were known, in the South of France, to be like winter elsewhere, and she would be returning to stay with Madame Bagnelli next summer. Oh and long before; —You will come for Christmas, or Pâques—at those times Bernard—it can be a bit difficult for you in Paris. Any time, this is always your home. The mimosa is already out, Christmas week, here—The warm cheek-kisses, the hug smelling of delicious soup vegetables and wood-varnish. And the nightingales ?—Of course! In May, you come in May and they’ll be here.—

  The London street was not tunnelled through dirty rain and fog they had told about. The trees were a heavy quiet green. Rugs of sunlight were laid by the long windows across Flora Donaldson’s Spanish matting. A ground-floor flat with a shared strip of garden sloping down towards it from the plane trees. Black birds (magpies ? Christmas-card birds of the Northern Hemisphere) called sweet exclamations from a soft domestic wilderness of uncut grass and daisies.

  More like a house! She was excited, on the telephone. A kind of wooden clock-face with a movable cow-tail to indicate how many pints the milkman should leave outside the door. A wall of books and a freezer full of food; one could withstand a siege. But the French did not know what England was like—England was the sun, and birds and lovers hidden in the grass. She was indoors hardly at all. She walked in the parks and took the boat to Greenwich. She knew no one and talked to everyone. Bernard Chabalier had to postpone his arrival for another two weeks because one of his fellow professors developed oreillons and the lycee was short-staffed. (What on earth... ? He did not know the name of the illness in English but described the symptoms—mumps, that’s what it was, mumps.) He not only telephoned every day except Sundays at home but also wrote long letters; the delay merely gave her longer to enjoy the anticipation of their being together, alone, among all these gentle pleasures. She was taking an audio-visual French course at a student centre—it cost little and was excellent. She had been to the French Consulate and was awaiting information about the validity of her BSc. physiotherapy degree in France. He had spoken confidentially to the Anti-Apartheid Committee chairman in Paris about arranging permanent residence and a work permit for her, probably using some such terms as ‘an unnamed member of a white family of prominent victims of apartheid’. Even between Paris and London, on the telephone or in letters, he was not more explicit than simply to let her know he had ‘talked to friends’, as if —another lover might pick up tics from his mistress in a desire to identify with the way of life that formed her before he knew her—he had taken on the customs of a country he never knew.

  Whereas apart from the precaution of registering at the student centre under a surname not her own—but that was for private rather than political reasons—Rosa Burger was relaxedly communicative and did not find herself in any conversations whose subject required discretion: exchanges with young mothers about the ingenuity of children making houses of sticks and leaves; discussions with barge-men about the fish who had come back to the Thames: arguments with fellow students about the meaning of this scene or that in a Japanese film everyone was seeing. Her quick responses did not extend to allowing herself to be picked up in bars—she had the invincible smiling trick of being able to turn aside such attempts that is possible only for a woman already in love. But she did go to a party with a young Indian couple who were learning French along with her. The girl came from India but the man spoke English with the accent Rosa recognized as he did hers. At the party there were other South African Indians; she had told the young couple her real name but asked them to respect her privacy for the time being—the other guests did not know her as anything more than a student from home. She met them again at the young couple’s flat. These casual encounters had the curious and unprevised effect of making her think, or daydream, about looking up the people it had been easy for her to undertake to avoid, because she could not have imagined herself wanting to do otherwise. Now she saw herself talking to them, accompanied by Bernard Chabalier. The next time one of the faithful in exile telephoned the flat on the chance that Flora might be there, Rosa no longer answered as an anonymous tenant; accepted the enthusiastic assumption that she would come round; sat on a Saturday afternoon in Swiss Cottage, a political refugee talking over old times. It was assumed that like them, she would be carrying on the struggle in one way or another; someone said she had mentioned France as her base. She went to another gathering; this time it turned out to be in honour of a Frelimo delegation in London to seek aid from the British government. Some of Samora Machel’s men had been to school or university in South Africa. In the common Southern African revolutionary cause between the blacks of Moçambique, Angola, Rhodesia and South Africa, the Frelimo government was part of black South Africans’ own self-realization, proof of themselves. Black Moçambiquan migratory labourers still worked alongside South African blacks in the gold mines and as servants in hotels and houses all over South Africa. The exiles from both countries had sat in refugee camps together, trained as guerrillas together in distant parts of the world, taken sides in each other’s internal power-struggles, splits and realignments ; they spoke one another’s languages, and the white man’s English that had culturally industrialized the whole tip of their continent even where the language of the colonial power was Portuguese. It was not easy to say which among the black men in the loudly crowded room was from Moçambique and which from South Africa. Among those in the uniform of leadership, at least: the well-cut suits or Mao jackets were favoured indiscriminately by the same kind of authoritative, path-clearing face, whether ANC or Frelimo, moving from group to group. A speech was made about Frelimo and the beginning of the end of colonialist-imperialism in Southern Africa. A speech was made about the African National Congress and the fight against racism and world fascism, linking Vorster with Pinochet. ‘A few words’ were spontaneously said—and developed into an elegy with the eloquence of one (of the faithful) who had drunk just enough to gauge his moment—about the great men who had not lived to see oppression in Southern Africa breached—Xuma, Luthuli, Mondlane, Fischer, and of course Lionel Burger, who was particularly in the thoughts of many people tonight because ‘someone closest to him’ and his wife Cathy Jansen, another fine comrade—was present among them. Lionel Burger’s role in the struggle; the callousness and cowardliness of the Vorster government, keeping an ageing, dying man in jail, in contrast with the courage of that man undefeated to his last breath who refused to allow any appeals for compassionate concessions on his own behalf, who asked nothing of Vorster less than justice for the people. The white racist government had stolen his body but his spirit was everywhere—in Moçambique; in this room, tonight. An elderly white Englishwoman came up and kissed the girl. She was taken off to be introduced to the Frelimo contingent. A middle-aged ANC man reminisced about campaigns of the 1960s, working with Burger. She smiled and thanked, like a bride at a reception or an actress backstage. Bernard Chabalier was privately present to her, keeping her surely in another order of reality.

  A Guardian journalist asked whether there was any chance of an interview ? An independent television producer wanted to arrange to talk to her about including Lionel Burger as a subject in a television series with the provisional title, ‘Standing on The Shoulders of History’. Was there access to photographs, letters, as well as (so fortunately) the testimony of many exiles right here in England who could talk about him? She mentioned a source in Sweden. The man solicitously drew her over to the table where hot sausages were being fished from a vast pot. There were some young black men eating clannishly, their knot turning backs upon the room. He broke in among them, chatting about his project, introducing the one or two he knew, murmuring the polite English burble that disguised a lack of names for the rest. They made the laconic response of people intruded upon. She was looking at one who, while he stood with tall shoulders hunched towards his plate, chewing, stared at her as if she threatened him in some way. He h
ad given her a thin, hot dry hand for a second, then it was stabbing at tough sausage-skin with a fork. She took her plate of food; the group that now included the television man and herself was again invaded by others, she became part of a new drift-away and nucleus. But she took no part in the conversation contained within this one. She ate slowly, and drank in regular swallows from her glass of wine. Presently she put aside plate and glass as if at a summons; the person talking beside her thought she had been waved to by someone outside all angles of vision but her own. She went back to the clique of young black men. Gritting words along with mouthfuls, he was talking, low, in Xhosa, to his neighbour, but the touch she had had from him earlier interpreted itself and she interrupted:—Baasie.—The answer to a question.

  A piece of skin or gristle that wouldn’t go down. He swallowed noticeably. The tendons connecting mouth to jaw pulled on the left side as he tried with cheek muscles to dislodge something caught between two teeth. The movement became distorted; into a smile, resuscitated, dug up, an old garment that still fits.

  —Yeh, Rosa.—

  She came on awkwardly (he put away his plate).

  She resorted to that foreigners’ greeting, brought from every café, bar and street-corner encounter, strained up to brush him on this cheek and that. He wiped his mouth as if her mouth had been there.—Yeh, Rosa. I saw you when you came in.—

  The conversation seemed to follow some formula, like a standard letter copied from a manual that deals with birthday greetings, births and deaths.

  —Are you living here, then—have you been away for a long time ?—

  —A couple of years, on and off.—

  —And before that ?—

  He frowned to dismiss the importance of any chronology; or to establish a constant in its vagueness.—Germany, Sweden. I was around.—

  —Studying something? What’s Sweden like? I’ve had an invitation to go there, but I’ve never done anything about it. They seem to be very helpful people.—

  He gave a sad, sour laugh.—They’re okay.—

  —Were you working, or—

  —Supposed to be studying economics. But the language. Man, you’ve got to spend two years learning that language before you can take a university course. You can’t understand what’s going on at lectures.—

  —I should think not! It must be terribly difficult.—

  —Oh you just give in, give up.—

  —And Germany ?—

  —It’s all right. I mean, from Afrikaans—it’s not so hard to pick up a bit of German.—

  —Are you still busy with a course, here, or have you graduated ?—He seemed uncertain whether to answer or not; not to have an answer.—Well, here, once you live in this place (a laugh, for the first time, his whole face trembled)—I haven’t really got back to it properly. I have to pass some exams and so on, first.—

  —Yes...I wonder if I’d be allowed to work, here. If my qualifications would be recognized.—

  —But you’ve been to a university, isn’t it ?—Like many blacks from their home country—his and hers—for whom English and Afrikaans are lingue franche, not mother tongues, he used the Afrikaans phrase translated literally, instead of the English equivalent.

  —Yes, but not all degrees are international. In fact very few. I took some sort of medical one. Not what I really wanted to do... but...—The reasons were implicit, for him.

  —Oh I’d thought you were a doctor, like your father ?—The television man was back, and a young couple attendant, waiting to be introduced to Rosa, listening with polite movements of the eyes from one face to another in order to miss nothing.—Incredible the way he just went on with his job, inside the jail, is that true ? The warders used to come to him with their aches and pains, they preferred him to the prison doctors ? They weren’t afraid he’d poison them or something ?—He laughed with Rosa; turned to the couple.—Fantastic man, fantastic. I’m inspired about doing him in the series. This is his daughter, Rosa Burger—Polly Kelly, Vernon Stern. They run the universities’ AAA, that’s nothing to do with the RAC—Action Anti-Apartheid—

  There was no need to introduce anyone else; the couple signalled greetings all round, they had met the company before. Rosa found an urgent way through the talk.—When will we see each other.—Before there was an answer—Come to me. Or I’ll come to you. We can meet somewhere—you say. I don’t know London. Are you very busy ?—

  —I’m not busy.—

  She borrowed a pen from somebody who fished it out of a breast-pocket without breaking the train of a conversation about migratory labour with Kelly and Stern. She wrote the address of the flat and the telephone number, and put the scrap of paper into his hand. He was glancing at it when someone else spoke to her and her attention was counter-claimed. He was here and there in the room all evening, not far from her, and once or twice she smiled, thought he might have felt her eyes on him, but he and she were not brought together in the crowd. He had always been slight; the type that will grow up tall and thin. A little boy with narrow, almost oriental eyes and the tiny ears of his race—her brother’s ears were twice the size when they did the anatomical comparisons children make in secret out of sexual curiosity and scientific wonder. There was an unevenness in his gaze across the room, now; standing close up, she had noticed that the right eye bulged a little, flickered in and out of focus. A scar cut across his frown; an old scar with pinhead lumps where stitches had been—but he hadn’t had it, that far back. The university couple followed her from group to group; she found herself the centre of women who wanted to know how women’s lib could have an explicit function in the South African situation (she should have referred them to Flora), and passed, by way of various people who claimed her, back to her Indian friends, where her father’s association with their leaders, Dadoo, Naicker, Kathrada, was being explained to the Guardian journalist. Very late, she was talking alone to one of the Frelimo men whose passion for his country was a revelation, seen from the remove of the Europeans who had accepted her as one of themselves, who understood nationalism only in terms of chauvinism or disgusted apathy. A sensual longing pleasantly overcame her, the wave of relaxation after a yawn; for Bernard; to show off this revelation of a man to Bernard Chabalier.—When your delegation goes to France, I’d like you to meet someone there.—

  He was enthusiastic.—Anyone who’s interested in Moçambique, I am interested... You understand ? Anyone who will help us. We need support from the French Leftists. And we get it, yes. But what we need more is money from the French government.—The pretty white girl said she couldn’t promise that...but the three of them could eat together, drink some wine. Their dates of arrival in Paris, so far as they could predict from present intentions, accommodatingly overlapped. She promised she would confirm this after her usual telephone call from Paris next day.

  The telephone ringing buried in the flesh.

  Bernard.

  Staggered—vertigo of sleep—hitting joyfully against objects in the dark, to the livingroom.

  The voice from home said: Rosa.

  —Yes—

  —Yeh, Rosa.—

  —It’s you, Baasie ?—

  —No.—A long, swaying pause.

  —But it is.—

  —I’m not ‘Baasie’, I’m Zwelinzima Vulindlela.—

  —I’m sorry—it just came out this evening...it was ridiculous.—

  —You know what my name means, Rosa ?—

  —Vulindlela ? Your father’s name...oh, I don’t know whether my surname means anything either—‘citizen’, solid citizen—Starting to humour the other one; at such an hour—too much to drink, perhaps.

  —Zwel-in-zima. That’s my name. ‘Suffering land’. The name my father gave me. You know my father. Yes.—

  —Yes—

  —Is it ? Is it ? You knew him before they killed him.—

  —Yes. Since we were kids. You know I did.—

  —How did they kill him?—You see, you don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t
talk about that.—

  —I don’t...because why should I say what they said.—

  —Tell it, say it—

  —What they always say—they found him hanged in his cell.—

  —How, Rosa ? Don’t you know they take away belts, everything—

  —I know.—

  —Hanged himself with his own prison pants.—

  ‘Baasie’—she doesn’t say it but it’s there in the references of her voice, their infant intimacy—I asked if you’d come and see me—or I’d come to you, tomorrow, but you—

  —No, I’m talking to you now.—

  —D’y’know what time it is ? I don’t even know—I just got to the phone in the dark—

  —Put on the light, Rosa. I’m talking to you.—

  She uses no name because she has no name for him.—I was fast asleep. We can talk tomorrow. We’d better talk tomorrow, mmh ?—

  —Put on the light.—

  Try laughing.—We’d better both go back to bed.—

  —I haven’t been in bed.—There were gusts of noise, abruptly cut off, background to his voice; he was still somewhere among people, they kept opening and shutting a door, there.

  —The party going strong ?—

  —I’m not talking about parties, Rosa—

  —Come tomorrow—today, I suppose it is, it’s still so dark—

  —You didn’t put the light on, then. I told you to.—

  They began to wrangle.—Look, I’m really not much use when I’m woken up like this. And there’s so much I want... How old were we ? I remember your father—or someone—brought you back only once, how old were we then ?—

  —I told you to put it on.—

  She was begging, laughing.—Oh but I’m so tired, man! Please, until tomorrow—

  —Listen. I didn’t like the things you said at that place tonight.—