I wrote down the address and left the piece of paper where I would keep seeing it. I read it over often. I had no sense of having been in the kind of streets that led there, only a few blocks from a High School. Paris. ‘Paris is a place far away in England.’
It isn’t Baasie—Zwel-in-zima, I must get the stress right—who sent me back here. You won’t believe that. Because I’m living like anyone else, and he was the one who said who was I to think we could be different from any other whites. Like anyone else; but the idea started with Brandt Vermeulen. You and my mother and the faithful never limited yourselves to being like anyone else.
I had met a woman in her nightdress wandering in the street. She was like anyone else: Katya, Gaby, Donna; poor thing, a hamster turning her female treadmill. I remember every detail of that street, could walk it with my eyes shut. My sense of sorority was clear. Nothing can be avoided. Ronald Ferguson, 46, ex-miner, died on the park bench while I was busy minding my own business. No one can defect.
I don’t know the ideology:
It’s about suffering.
How to end suffering.
And it ends in suffering. Yes, it’s strange to live in a country where there are still heroes. Like anyone else, I do what I can. I am teaching them to walk again, at Baragwanath Hospital. They put one foot before the other.
Rosa Burger’s return to her native country within the period for which her passport was valid coincided with two events rivalling each other in prominence in the newspapers. Orde Greer was on trial for treason. He was accused on three counts: of having written one of the (discarded) versions of the text of a leaflet, alleged to be inciting, distributed in Cape Town by means of a pamphlet-bomb exploded in a street; of harbouring certain manuals pertaining to urban guerrilla warfare, including Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’État and the writings of General Giap; and—the chief indictment—having attempted to recruit a young man of a well-known liberal family, doing his compulsory military service, to supply information and photographic material relating to South Africa’s defence installations and equipment. The trial was well under way. The State had almost concluded its evidence when Rosa Burger attended a session. The trial was held in Johannesburg because Greer was not considered a sufficiently prominent personality for there to be any risk of whites crowding the court, and with the growing political separatism between white and black radicals it was thought that the mobs of blacks who rally where political trials of their own kind are in progress would be unlikely to gather. In fact hundreds of blacks congregated outside the courts each day; the trial was transferred to a remote maize-farming town in the Eastern Transvaal before the Defence was heard.
At the stage at which Rosa was present the court was still sitting in Johannesburg. Someone made room for her on the very end of a bench in the last row of the visitors’ gallery; she had in her coat-pocket a scarf handy, but found since her father was on trial the talmudic convention by which women were expected to cover their heads in the presence of a judge had lapsed. Orde Greer was being cross-examined on the State evidence of the recording of a long-distance telephone call monitored by a device he was not aware had been installed, in his flat, by the post office on the instructions of the Security Branch, BOSS. The court heard the whirr of the tape then Orde Greer’s voice, not sober, at one point maudlin, asking what had he done? What had he failed to do? The call was identified with documentary evidence that the person to whom it was addressed, and who had replaced the receiver at once on (presumably) recognizing the voice and hearing the first few sentences, was a former South African Communist, an expert on explosives as a result of his experiences as a Desert Rat during the war and now believed to be directing urban terrorism in South Africa. The Prosecution put it to Greer that first having been recruited some time in 1974, he had been dropped by the Communist Party because of unreliability. He had a drinking problem, didn’t he ? His masters’ lack of confidence in him was vindicated beyond all doubt by this preposterous telephone call asking for further instructions in the underground work they had entrusted him with... Acting on a sense of ‘disappointed destiny’ he had been ‘devilishly inspired’—had he not ?—to prove himself to his masters, to reinstate himself in their good books. He had even conquered his drinking, for a time. He consulted a doctor about his drinking problem, visiting Dr A. J. Robertse, a Durban psychiatrist, on 25th February 1975, while on an assignment to that town in the course of his work as a journalist. He had told Dr Robertse that he was under stress due to marital problems. But he had no ‘marital’ problems; he was not, had never been married, his problems were with his masters, the Communists in London, who no longer trusted him because of his drinking. He had determined to show himself worthy of them, and it was therefore he himself, acting on his own initiative but strictly within the aims and objects of the Communist Party, who had tried to obtain military information by persuading a young National Serviceman that if he were indeed a liberal vociferously opposed to the policy of apartheid, he ought to be willing to steal documents, make sketches, take photographs that could lead to the destruction of the army by whose strength the policy was maintained—in short, that this young man’s duty was not to defend his country but to become a traitor to it.
Rosa Burger was not able to attend the trial again. A week after her return she took up an appointment in the physiotherapy department of a black hospital. She followed the proceedings, like everyone else, in the newspapers. The Defence admitted that Orde Greer had written a text which appeared in a somewhat different form as a leaflet distributed by means of a harmless explosive device (‘no more revolutionary than a firework set off on New Year’s Eve’). The difference in the texts was crucial: Greer’s version (Exhibit A of the documentation seized on the occasions when his flat was raided by the police) included no exhortations to violence, whereas the text of the leaflet actually disseminated had several statements, clearly added later and by someone else, that possibly could be interpreted to be of this nature. The well-known phrase used by Greer—was it not heard in every pulpit, employed to put the righteous fear of God into every Christian community ?—‘day of reckoning’ was by no means a threat of violence or an encouragement to violence. It was, on the contrary, a reminder that everyone would have to account to his own conscience for his convictions and actions, in the end.
There was long argument between Defence and Prosecution on the definition of ‘manual’: was Clausewitz’s classic on strategy a ‘manual’ or an historical work on the waging of warfare, a special kind of military memoir ? And if the latter, were not General Giap’s writings a modern counterpart ? As for the Luttwak book on the do-it-yourself coup—could anybody take such a work seriously ? Was it not patently the sort of radical chic with which people living in politically stable countries titillated themselves, a subject of cocktail-party expertise ?—The judge asked for a definition of the term ‘radical chic’, and this provided an item for a journalist whose assignment was sidelights, preferably ironical if not bathetic, on the trial.—And taken in the context of the reading matter of a man who was demonstrably an exceptionally wide reader—a man who earned a modest salary and must have spent a good percentage of it on the 3,000-odd books, on all subjects, that were the main furnishings of his tiny flat—was the presence of the Giap and Luttwak books of any significance ? The defendant would say he had been sent both books by publishers, for review during the period when he had been acting literary editor of a journal.
Finally, the Defence provided a sensational poster for the evening paper by keeping quiet, until the appropriate moment, about a discovery made: the ‘expert on explosives’ identified by the State as the man to whom Greer was talking in the incoherent taped telephone conversation had been in Stockholm on the date on which the call was faithfully recorded by the device secretly attached to Greer’s telephone. The number was that listed under the man’s name in the London telephone directory, yes, but the subscriber himself was not living in England at the time. There was no pr
oof that the person who answered the telephone was a member of the Communist Party, in fact there was no proof of any identity that could be attached to that voice; and whoever it belonged to had replaced the receiver promptly, as one normally does when one gets a nuisance call. The defendant would not deny the evidence that he was not sober when the call was made. In fact he would submit that he had no memory of having made the call.
But it was the main count—the alleged recruitment of a young liberal doing his military service stint—that roused fly-bitten, carious-breathed antagonisms sleeping beneath the table, in the white suburbs. Quiet dinners among intelligent people turned shrill and booming as men and women gave vent to their secret judgments of each other’s political and personal morality under the guise of disagreement about the political and moral significance not so much of Orde Greer’s action as that of the young man whom he had approached. This young man had at first agreed to do what Greer asked, and was in a position to do so because he was some sort of assistant-cum-driver to a military press attaché, often accompanying his officer with the top brass on official inspection of secret installations around the country, humble enough in status to be ignored as a piece of furniture, but with ears and eyes wide open, and hands with access to files and photographs kept as classified information. After a brief period during which he produced nothing for Greer except a confidential guide to behaviour when among foreign rural blacks—a leaflet issued to South African troops during the invasion of Angola—he apparently grew afraid or decided for some other reason that he was not willing to continue his commitment to Greer. With fist closed at rest beside a wineglass, if not thumped, someone insisted that the proper course for that young man, if he was so repelled by the idea of serving in ‘that army’, if it went so strongly against his principles, was to become a conscientious objector. Not a spy. The liberal position was to oppose the present regime openly, not betray the right of the people of the country to defend themselves against foreign powers who wanted to take advantage of this situation.—A younger man laughed fiercely: When would people learn that this playing-fields morality showed a complete misunderstanding of what repression is.—You say you want to free the blacks and ourselves of this government, and at the same time you expect people to ‘play the game’, be ‘decent’—Christ! Apartheid is the dirtiest social swindle the world has ever known—and you want to fight it according to the rules of patriotism and honesty and decency evolved for societies where everyone has something worth protecting from betrayal. These virtues, these precious ‘standards’ of yours—they’re just another swindle, here, don’t you see? The blacks haven’t ever been allowed into your schools, your clubs, your army, for God’s sake, so what do the rules mean? Whose rules ? You say you’re against white supremacy—then you can’t confine your conscience to moral finesse only whites can afford. That chap had every right to use his compulsory army service to take any information he could get that would contribute to destroying that army and all it stands for. What’s ‘done’, what ‘isn’t’; I just want to smash these bastards here every way we can. Do you want to get rid of them or don’t you ? That’s all I ask myself.—William Donaldson interrupted the argument with a choice of Grand Marnier or Williamine while his wife Flora followed with the serving of the coffee.
Orde Greer was found guilty on the main count of the indictment and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. The one occasion on which Rosa had seen him in court he was smartened up like a scruffy boy made presentable for a summons to the headmaster’s office. His beard was shaved off. His hair, still long, had been combed wet until tamed. He wore a tan corduroy suit provided by someone who didn’t want to go so far as to put him entirely out of character in navy pin-stripe. She did not think he saw her in the gallery. His gingerish, unattractive face (for a long time the eyes in their deep archways, the thin, twirly intelligent mouth, the high bifurcated forehead with the frizz of hair behind the ears would be the image with which the faces of all men would be matched)—Orde Greer’s face was quiet and privately enquiring, as if he and his accusers were going through some process of scrutiny together, as one. She had this transparency of Greer across her mind when she read that in his opportunity to address the court he had said (inevitably) he had acted according to his conscience. Then he had interrupted himself—saying no, no—that was just a phrase, what he meant was according to ‘necessity’. People were detained every day merely for expressing too freely their conviction that theirs was an unjust, hypocritical and cruel society. ‘I’ve spent many years being proud of hob-nobbing with the people who were brave enough to risk their lives in action. I spent too many years looking on, writing about it; I would rather go to prison now for acting against evil than have waited to be detained without even having done anything.’
The other front-page story became one only when it was learned that a South African was involved. Before then it was a European affair, concerning the hijackings, kidnappings of industrialists and murders of embassy officials and politicians for which responsibility was claimed by, and sometimes imputed to international terrorist groups. A man known as Garcia, believed to be of Bolivian origin and belonging to the Armed Nucleus For Popular Autonomy (NAPAP), the Japanese Red Army, the Baader-Meinhof gang, or perhaps some new grouping including these and others, was thought to be the brain behind the most recent series of urban terrorist activities. He remained at large and had been sheltered by a number of women, each unaware of the others’ existence, with whom he had love affairs in London, Amsterdam and Paris. The one in Paris turned out to be a South African girl employed by the Citrus Board to promote the sale of oranges. The story dominated the Sunday papers; she was Marie Nel, daughter of a prominent Springbok Flats farmer, who with his wife also ran the dorp hotel. There were photographs of its façade, showing the bar and the name above it: C. J. S. Nel, Licensed to sell wine and spirituous liquors. There was a photograph of Marie Nel of the startled flashlight kind taken by itinerant photographers in nightclubs; the occasion appeared to be Christmas or New Year, and the venue must have been a South African city—a smiling Indian waiter in the background.
The story took on another week’s lease of life when one of the journalists, no doubt in the course of snooping about the dorp, learned that Mrs Velma Nel was the sister of Lionel Burger. To many readers this seemed some sort of explanation. The differences between the anarchic phenomenon of a Baader-Meinhof gang or something called the Japanese Red Army which had little to do with Japan, and the ideas of a Lionel Burger who wanted to hand over his country to the blacks, were blurred by the equal distance of such ideas from these readers’ comprehension. Marie Nel’s cousin, daughter of Lionel Burger and only surviving member of his immediate family, was working as a physiotherapist in a Johannesburg hospital. An old photograph reproduced from the newspaper’s files showed a young girl coming out of court in the course of her father’s trial.
Not even a postcard from the Musée de Cluny.
The unicorn among the beautiful medieval ladies, the tapestry flowers, shy rabbits; the mirror. O dieses ist das Tier das es nicht gibt. At the conjunction of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Boulevard Saint-Michel. An old abbey on the site of Gallo-Roman thermae, and she would walk into the court-yard described and up into the half-round hall where you can sit on the shallow well of steps and look at the six tapestries. On an azure island of a thousand flowers the Lady is holding a mirror in which the unicorn with his forelegs on the folded-back red velvet of her dress’s lining sees a tiny image of himself. But the oval of the mirror cuts off the image just at the level at which the horn rises from his head: a horn white as his coat, plumed tail, mane and curly beard, a tall horn delicately turned. Two tresses of her golden hair are bound with a fillet of pearls up round her oval face (like the gilt frame round the mirror) and twisted together on top of her head imitating the modelling of his horn, which at the same time is itself an artifice, êh, bone fashioned to imitate a spiral... A smiling lion holds an armorial
pennon. Rabbits are there, a dog, a spotted genet. Foxes, cheetahs, lion cubs, a falcon pursuing a heron, partridges, a pet monkey tethered by a chain to a little roller—that was done to prevent it from climbing trees—these are to be made out round the representation of the other four senses:
The Lion and the Unicorn listening to music played in the garden by the Lady on her portable organ.
The Lady weaving sweet-smelling carnations into a chaplet while her monkey sniffs at a rose inquisitively pilfered from a basket.
The Lady taking sweets from a dish held by her maid; she may be going to feed them to her parakeet—the monkey is secretly tasting something good.
The Lady touches the Unicorn’s horn.
A sixth tapestry shows the Lady before a sumptuous pavilion or tent, amusing herself with a box of jewels. In medieval Bestiaries he is called a ‘monocheros’; he is there, paired with the Lion this time, holding aside with a hoof one of the flaps of the tent and gracefully rampant (the ridiculous position of a begging dog), supporting her standard. A legend is woven in gold round the canopy of the tent, A mon seul désir.
Here they are: to love you by letting you come to discover what I love.
There she sits, gazing, gazing.
An old and lovely world, gardens and gentle beauties among gentle beasts. Such harmony and sensual peace in the age of the thumbscrew and dungeon that there it comes with its ivory spiral hornthere she sits gazing
bedecked, coaxed, secured at last
by a caress—O the pretty dear! the wonder! Nothing to startle, nothing left to fear, approaching—
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