Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— No. Oh a dog or cat. Birds we killed at school, with a catapult. Or at least they did — others. I gave up.—

She smiled. — Why—

— They didn’t sing any more.—

— So you chose the ‘joy of living’.—

— In my way. Being told it was cruel certainly hadn’t stopped me.—

Somewhere down in the wilderness outside the cottage the roadmakers had an equipment dump, with mounds of small stones, upturned wheelbarrows treacled with tar, poles and trestles and lanterns for barricades. There was a hut made of sheets of lead ceiling and loose bricks from the demolished mansion. The watchman’s brazier, pierced with triangular red eyes at night, smoked through half-bald pepper trees and velour-leafed loquats during the day; outlaw cats waited to streak upon the crusts of burned mealie-meal from the big black pot without a handle that belched on the coals. The sounds of a camp established the direction of the place; there were always hangers-on gathered around him. Rosa came upon the curious stance of the back of a drunk man peeing against a tree; or the cat, sensing the presence of some menace from its own kind, suddenly pinned in thin air an uncompleted gambol.

The watchman gave Conrad money to place bets at the race-course. The man came regularly to the cottage in the late afternoons; he took off his yellow oilskin hat and asked for the master. If Conrad were not there but might be back soon, Rosa invited him to come in but such a suggestion was incomprehensible to him, he understood it only as the established procedure for approaching a white man’s house; sat on the broken step that was all that remained of five that had once led to the verandah, and waited until the white man came.

Conrad squatted down with him there. He read out the names of horses and the odds quoted and the watchman interrupted with throat-noises of assent or sometimes let silences of indecision hold, after Conrad had paused, expecting assent. Conrad pushed the man’s paper money into the pocket of his jeans, from which he would use it as ready cash; apparently he took its equivalent from his earnings at the race-course when actually placing the bets at the tote. The watchman giggled with falsetto joy as he was paid out a win. He would take the young white man by the wrist, the shoulder, good fortune made flesh. He would ask, as of right, for a beer. Conrad laughed. — He should be standing me.—

She brought the beer cans. — You’re the fount from which all blessings flow.—

Once the black man was emboldened by happiness to talk to her. — Your brother is very clever. I like such a clever one like him.—

— What happens when that watchman loses his money?—

— It’s gone. That’s all.—

— He can’t afford the risk.—

— He can’t afford the kick he gets out of winning, either.—

When they went among Conrad’s friends she talked easily and he was almost as withdrawn as he was when they encountered the Burger faction. One of his friends was building a sailing ship in a backyard. Rosa laughed with pleasure at the incongruous sight, rearing up between a dog kennel, a garage, and the servant’s room where the bed raised on bricks could be seen through the open door. Conrad studied diagrams and charts relating to the ship’s construction and the seas on the route proposed. Apparently the idea was that he would navigate from island to island across the Indian Ocean to Australia. The friend looked up at her, casually generous. — Come along.—

— Oh I’d love to. You could drop me off at Dar es Salaam to see my brother.—

It was a game, pretending she had a passport, referring to the son of her father’s first marriage, whom she had never seen, as her sibling; her polite fantasy to make herself acceptable among these people absorbed in planing wild-smelling wood and sewing bunk covers. Like a temptation, she returned to its conventions while she and Conrad were cutting each other’s hair in the bathroom of the cottage. He had read aloud a poem Baudelaire wrote about Mauritius, translating for her.

— André and his girl have it all out of a manual. I think I’d be scared to go all that way to sea with only one person aboard who knows anything about sailing.—

— So what? You’re not scared to stay at home and go to prison.—

She held his head steady to gauge the evenness of the hair-level over the ears. He let her snip towards his lobes.

She took his place on the lid of the lavatory seat. He put round her shoulders the towel furred with his hair, the pale colour and rough as the nap of sacking. — Close your eyes.—

She felt the cold little metal beak along her forehead. — Not too much. Don’t scalp me.—

— Don’t worry. You look okay. You’ll survive.—

She spoke with a change of key. — Why should I go to prison?—

— Well you will, won’t you. Sooner or later.—

Her eyes were closed against the falling hair. — If Lionel and my mother…if the concepts of our life, our relationships, we children accepted from them were those of Marx and Lenin, they’d already become natural and personal by the time they reached me. D’you see? It was all on the same level at which you — I—children learn to eat with a knife and fork, go to church if their parents do, use the forms of address by which the parents’ attitudes — respect, disapproval, envy, whatever — towards people are expressed. I was the same as every other kid.—

— You were not. You are not. Not my kind of kid.—

— You were exceptional. From what you’ve told me.—

— No. Go to church if the parents do. Exactly. You’re all atheists, yes? But being brought up in a house like your father’s is growing up in a devout family. Perhaps nobody preached Marx or Lenin… They just lay around the house, leather-bound with gold tooling, in everybody’s mind — the family bible. It was all taken in with your breakfast cornflakes. But the people who came to your house weren’t there for tea-parties with your mother or bridge evenings with cigars. They weren’t your father’s golf-playing fellow doctors or ladies your mother went shopping with, ay? — They came together to make a revolution. That was ordinary, to you. That— intention . It was ordinary. It was the normal atmosphere in that house.—

— You have the craziest ideas about that house. — She was brought up short by her own use of the definition ‘that house’, distancing the private enclosures of her being.

— Keep still. You’ll be nicked.—

— You seem to think people go around talking revolution as if they were deciding where to go for their summer holidays. Or which new car to buy. You romanticize. — The cartilage of her nostrils stiffened. The patient manner patronized him, displayed the deceptive commonplace that people accustomed to police harassment use before the uninitiated.

— I don’t mean in so many words — their preoccupations supposed the revolution must be achieved; the scale of what mattered and what didn’t, what moved you and didn’t, in your life every day, presupposed it. Didn’t it?—

She had stayed the attack of the scissors, holding up almost aggressively a jagged piece of mirror to see what he was taking off her nape hair. She was murmuring, complaining of him without attentive coherence. — I went to school, I had my friends, our place was always full of people who did all sorts of different jobs and talked about everything under the sun…you were there once, you saw—

— What’d you celebrate in your house? The occasions were when somebody got off, not guilty, in a political trial. Leaders came out of prison. A bunch of blacks made a success of a boycott or defied a law. There was a mass protest or a march, a strike… Those were your nuptials and fiestas. When blacks were shot by the police, when people were detained, when leaders went to jail, when new laws shifted populations you’d never even seen, banned and outlawed people, those were your mournings and your wakes. These were the occasions you were taught (precept and example, oh I know that, nothing authoritarian about your father) were the real ones, not your own private kicks and poor little ingrown miseries. — But where are they, those miseries, and your great wild times? I look at you…—