Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— Some blacks shot in the back. It’s something that changed the look of everything for you, in there (indicating the house) the way firelight passes over a room in the dark. Am I supposed to believe that?—

— But at twelve, you must have been aware—

— Political events couldn’t ever have existed for me at that age. What shooting could compare with discovering for myself that my mother had another man? If your father had succeeded in a conspiracy to rouse the whole population of blacks to revolution, I wouldn’t have known what hit me.—

— What’d you do?—

— What does Oedipus do about two rivals? I lay on her in daydreams at school, and when she was serving dinner I stared at her dress where her legs divided— how awful ? (she could hear in his voice the mimicry of the shocked face he imagined he could see on her in the dark) — I was mad about her; now I could be, with someone other than my father there already. I was in love; you don’t think about anything else then.—

Two black men with a woman, arms akimbo between them, went by chattering explosively, servants at home in their white masters’ orbit of neighbourly domesticity. They did not notice or did not recognize Rosa. — Your mother — who lives in Knysna?—

— My mother. The same. She’s not old now but the other thing — you know, in between. Old at the roots; when her hair grows out half-an-inch white she dyes it again. Never more than half-an-inch old. She’s got a better figure than you, in trousers. Lives with my sister, that thoroughly domesticated character who has produced five children. No men around except my sister’s little fat stud. They run a pottery school, the two women. She’s always bending over the kiln, or something in the oven or grandchildren who need their noses wiped. The same one: I suppose she is.—

The telephone had stopped ringing in the house. Rosa knew by some faint lack of distraction in her ears. Somebody living there now had picked it up.

— Got a match? — She did not smoke.

He paused a second, took out his lighter with thumb scuffing to ignite it. As if guided, he passed the small illumination across the plaque of dimensions that did not cover exactly the whitish square on the brick gateway: the baked enamel profile of a fierce dog, warning emblem of the installation of a burglar alarm system.

— What happened then—

— Nothing happened — not as things were always happening in that house. — They turned away from it, under the pavement trees. — Some of us knew, and some didn’t, I suppose. I think our girl did and that gave her a hold over my mother, the white missus was afraid of someone… I think I saw that in the way my mother treated her, always flattering her a bit. That’s how you learn about power, from things like that. Poor ma. I didn’t think of her body any more because I became fascinated by the electrical points in the house.—

The street-lights lost and found them at regular intervals, the street gave way to another. — I knew from one of those kid’s kits I got one Christmas or birthday — no, I suppose I was doing physics at school by then — how quickly two-twenty volts pass through your body. Just a second’s contact. You don’t have to grasp or thrust. It’s not like sticking a knife, or definite as pulling a trigger. Just a touch. I used to stand looking at that brown bakelite thing for minutes at a time: all you have to do is switch on and stick your fingers in the holes. A terrible fear and temptation.—

Their voices rose and fell alone in the cottage. A few steps out into the wilderness and the surge of cicadas mastered, obliterated them as the darkness did their bodies between street-lights; at certain times of day the rise of traffic from the freeways by which they were almost surrounded swirled, isolating words like the cries of birds where the tide engulfs a promontory.

— Didn’t you ever imagine killing something, just because it was small and weak? You know how you’re obsessed with the possibility of death when you’re adolescent. A rabbit that was afraid of you? Somebody’s baby you admired in a pram? What it would be like — so easy — to hurt it as a punishment for its helplessness? Rosa? Haven’t you even noticed the look of a kid’s face sometimes, when it gazes at the infant lying there. A little head you could imagine crushing, while never being able to hurt anything? When you were a kid? What did you make of those feelings?—

Once she appealed, half-angry. — Conrad, you won’t believe it. It’s like saying to someone you never masturbated. I don’t know that I ever had them.—

— The day somebody said look, that’s Rosa Burger…from the first time…I have the impression you’ve grown up entirely through other people. What they told you was appropriate to feel and do. How did you begin to know yourself? You go through the motions… what’s expected of you. What you’ve come to rely on.—

She had taken on a way of sitting up very straight, at once resistant and yet alert to the point of strain. She did not need to look at him.

— I don’t know how else to put it. Rationality, extraversion…but I want to steer clear of terms because that’s what I’m getting at: just words; life isn’t there. The tension that makes it possible to live is created somewhere else, some other way.—

Sometimes she parried, insulting in her return to the manner of one who could not be reached by someone like him.

— In the I Ching. —

— That crap. — The girl he slept with carried the book as her breviary.

— According to Jung, then. — A book beside the bed.

— But there’s something there for you, never mind! One day when he was a kid Jung imagined God sitting up in the clouds and shitting on the world below. His father was a pastor… You commit the great blasphemy against all doctrine, and you begin to live…—

— What tension are you talking about? Why tension?—

— The tension between creation and destruction in yourself. — Rosa, lips together, breathing fast, the look of someone struggling with anger, dismay or contempt. — Wandering between your fantasies and obsessions.—

— Yes, fantasies, obsessions. They’re mine. They’re the form in which the question of my own existence is being put to me. From them come the marvels (in that gesture he had from some bar- or bible-thumping ancestor he put the flat of his hand, hard, on Borges’ poems she had been reading), the real reasons why you won’t kill and perhaps why you can go on living. Saint-Simon and Fourier and Marx and Lenin and Luxemburg whose namesake you are — you can’t get that from them.—

When he began to talk (he who had no conversation among other people) she would lose mental grip of what she was occupied with, keeping still and quiet as if to attract something that might approach her. Her hands told the beads of repetitive gesture. Her feet and calves went numb beneath her weight but she did not get up from her place on the floor, the continuance of a sensation holding a train of lucidity.

— Of course I wanted to kill myself. I believed I ought to kill myself for fucking my mother. That’s clear and easy to you and me. No difference, when it comes to guilt, between what you’ve done and what you’ve imagined. But I had no idea…I didn’t know the connection existed.—

— You poor little devil.—

— No no no. Rosa, I’m telling the truth about what matters . This was just one of the ways I happened to come to reaching the realities: sex and death. Everything else is ducking away.—

She raked the four fingers of her left hand through the stiff, dirty pile of the old carpet, again and again.

— You saw someone dead when you were little.—